


and still, it moves

by miabicicletta



Series: Certain Calculations [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Babies, F/M, Parentlock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 05:28:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miabicicletta/pseuds/miabicicletta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He sees it in the wistful glances at small children on the street, and in the way she deviates from her usual trek throughout the hospital in favor of routes that pass the maternity ward."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> People should tell me to shut up about babies, man, but, no – I cannot shut up about babies. Unending thanks to the inimitable and ingenious **[Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington)** for her generous feedback, brilliant suggestions and all-around amazing beta read. She is _aces_ , you guys.

\---

_"Already a new man in your life?" he asked, pushing through the door to her small office. She sat at her desk, making notes in a file and bouncing an infant in her lap._

_"Well, you know. Have to move fast with the young ones or someone else will pick them up,” she said brightly. Sherlock registered the play on words, smiled._

_"Charlie,” Molly explained. “Belongs to Sally, one of the nurses upstairs. She was on the way out and forgot to drop off a chart. Told her I'd mind him for a while.” Charlie snuggled against her shoulder, babbling as he reached for her ponytail. Molly gave him her thumb to grasp at. Developing his tactile senses; thoughtful of her._

_“Post mortem you wanted is over there,” she said, gesturing to a lone file on top of the cabinet. She continued to bounce Charlie on her knee, humming a little tune. Something familiar. He was halfway through her findings (painstaking in detail, down to the toppings on the pizza the deceased apparently consumed as his unintended last meal) when the words began to make sense._

_He turned over his shoulder, watching Charlie the Nurse’s Child tug at her long hair, spilling it out of its binding. "Do you want children, Molly?"_

_"Yeah. Of course. Someday," she said, absently._

_He finished his report as Molly Hooper sing-songed the bones of the vertebral column to a cheerful little tune._

_(In a sunny, far-removed and much neglected room of his mind palace, Sherlock Holmes privately admitted that if there was anyone worth having a child with, it would be a woman who could turn the thoracic vertebra into a nursery rhyme.)_

\---

He sees it in the wistful glances at small children on the street, and in the way she deviates from her usual trek throughout the hospital in favor of routes that pass the maternity ward. When she queues for coffee. As she waits on the platform at Barbican Tube. Most often, he catches it directed toward the lovely and expectant Mary Watson.

“You’re considering having a child,” Sherlock says. The morgue is quiet at this late hour, as he expected. 

Molly Hooper does not look up from the slide she’s examining. “Yes.” 

_Interesting_. “Are you giving up on love, Molly?” It is the not the sneer it might have been, once. 

She lifts her face from her microscope, though not to him, her eyes resting on some spot near the emergency procedures chart. “Not so much ‘given up’ just...sorted my priorities, I suppose.” When she does turn to look at him, her gaze does not demure. Somewhere in the years after she orchestrated his death, the fretful stumbling went out of her. Perhaps killing a man will do that. Now he sees a young woman (no longer as young as she seems) and a friend. 

“What do you need?” he asks. 

Her brow furrows in confusion for a moment until the penny drops and her eyes widen, just a barely. _Oh_ , he sees her think. 

_Oh._

\---

“Just tell me one thing,” John Watson demands. He takes a measured breath, choosing his words with care. He looks to Sherlock with uncertain curiosity, and no small bit of menace as well. He cares for Molly. Frankly he is not at all sure how he feels about this development yet. So he goes to 221B, takes his place in the old armchair, folds his hands together and asks,“Why?” 

Sherlock steeples his fingers below his chin, staring dispassionately through window at London, mad and terrible and perfect as it is. “I asked her to help me, once. She didn’t hesitate, even though it meant lying to her friends. Keeping my secrets. Deceiving her colleagues. But she did it anyway because I asked her to.”

He turns, meeting John’s scrutiny at last. “So why, John? Because three years ago I made Molly Hooper kill me. “

John thinks maybe, _maybe_ , he understands, just a little. As best anyone ever can understand what goes on in Sherlock’s mind, anyway. 

“I owe her a life,” his best friend says. 

\---

Anna Hooper Holmes is born on cold day in late October, a tufty stripe of black hair running a perfect line down the middle of her head. 

Sherlock’s daughter would, of course – just, _of course_ she would – be born with a mohawk. 

"And already the nonconformist, I see," John comments, a grin crossing his face. “Brilliant beauty. Well done, Molly. She’ll be bossing David around in no time,” he says, glancing sympathetically at his six-month-old son, asleep in the carrier with the ratty tail of a stuffed toy in his mouth. Right, well. Probably not a master chef, then. 

“Mary’s matching them in the crib, I think,” Molly beams. Just hours after giving birth, she glows with happiness, but also appears more nervous than he’s seen her for years. New Parent Terror, he diagnoses. He’s only just gotten over it himself. 

“Can you blame me?” Mary says, brushing Anna’s spiky locks with her fingertips. “Think of the gene pool. Between our brains and good looks, there will be no stopping them.” She looks sympathetically between John and Sherlock, adding, “I’m sure you boys add something to the package as well.” 

“Unless of course she prefers women,” Sherlock drawls from his perch against the wall. “She certainly does now. Well, just the one, really.” 

“Shut up,” Molly says, regaining her feist and throwing a decisive look in his direction. _Leave the speculation about our daughter’s sexuality for at least another decade, will you?_

“You’re a lucky man, Sherlock Holmes,” Mary says to him before they leave Barts. “You be good.” 

“I’m always good,” he replies. “Oh, you mean be _nice_. No. Boring.” Mary smacks him playfully. So far, parenthood hasn’t changed Sherlock. 

(On the whole, John is somehow relieved to know it.)

\---

He understood, finally, in the moment after the pediatric nurse placed his daughter in his arms and she had looked upon him with wide, pale eyes, full of infinite questions – when she held his gaze for the first time; when she did not cry – that this, _this_ was all that people meant to say when they spoke _love_. 

She is small; her tiny hands cannot encircle his thumb. She does little other than sleep and eat, and yet, he is fascinated by her in all ways. Love is a still a thing that perplexes him in the abstract. But not her. Oh, never her. If love in the the macrocosmic takes the shape of bloggers and colleagues and brothers and friends, then in its simplest, purest form, it is exists in the sound of Anna’s soft giggles; the warm, pliant curve of her skull; the gentle grip of her infant fingers attempting the most instinctive of movements. His mammalian brain demands bonding, and so, bond he does. 

(He is no longer given to fighting off his baser instincts, it would seem.)

At Baker Street he dutifully presents her to Mrs. Hudson, who cries with happiness and coos like a pigeon. Molly cries a little, but in the way that indicates happiness, rather than grief and hurting. When she falls asleep in his bed, exhausted from labor and its aftermath, he presses a kiss to her forehead, studying her in silence: the curtain of hair spilling over her shoulder, curve of her jaw, so small in his hands. Strange; she is so much larger in his mind than in life.

He walks Anna around the flat, introducing her to Bill the Skull, and to Kevin the bison on the wall. He describes his experiments, and by her solemn expression can see she’s already very much interested in how they turn out. Obviously. 

(A door in his mind opens on the very room in which they stand, and in his vision a young ponytailed girl sits politely at his side, smirking at his clients and exchanging private smiles with him when they reach the same conclusions.)

At John’s wedding he had admitted he’d never expected to be anyone’s best friend. It naturally followed that he never expected to be anyone’s father. And if the terror he felt then pales in comparison to what he feels now, well, he’s risen to the occasion before. 

( _Hadn’t he?_ ) 

The groaning of footsteps on the stairs. Not as loud as the last time he visited; Mycroft must be dieting again. 

Sherlock cocks his head to the side, looking out the corner of his eye. “What’s that? We have a visitor? Well spotted, darling. She’s very observant,” he says, turning around. “No surprise there.” 

Mycroft stands in the door clasping his omnipresent umbrella. “Well, genetics is something of a lottery. So: The offspring,” he says, pronouncing it with mild distaste. 

“Anna, meet your uncle Mycroft,” he says, proffering the perfection of her. 

“How _proud_ you must–” 

What casual disdain lay in his brother’s smug expression vanishes. It is almost instantaneous, the spell she casts upon him. Anna crows and chirrups a sweet, infant’s sound as she burrows into Sherlock’s shirted arm. Mycroft appears to be wonderstruck. His brows furrow so comically Sherlock can practically hear the query register: **[UNKNOWN DATA]**. He suddenly has a better grasp of the expression _love at first sight_. A thing he hadn’t thought possible. _Interesting_. 

“Oh,” Mycroft manages. 

_Well played_ , he thinks, congratulating his daughter on her first victory over Mycroft (the first of many, he is certain, if the look of utter enchantment on his brother’s face is to be believed). 

Anna makes another small sound. “Hmm?” Sherlock sounds. “Oh, she’d like you to know she wants to be a pirate,” he relays.

Mycroft briefly looks up, nonplussed at his minor theatrics. “Indeed.” 

“I speak Baby, you know. Learned it in just a few hours.” 

His brother purses his lips, not even bothering to roll his eyes. “I’m sure.” 

“Oh, sit down, Mycroft. Hold your niece. She’s light enough that even you can manage.” 

“Well, I don’t–” 

But before he can properly object, Sherlock tugs him off balance, settling him into the chair by the fireplace. He hands Anna off, placing her neatly in his brother’s arm, ensuring her head is properly held. She fusses briefly before quickly settling in, finding herself quite content. 

Mycroft gawks in silence. Eventually he manages, “I must say it, Sherlock. I never thought…” He trails off, thoughtful. A silence hangs between them. Something more than the sum of their familial or fraternal parts, always a solution equal parts rivalry and bitterness tinged with a dash of obligation, diluted by regret. 

Finally Mycroft offers a somewhat terse, though seemingly heartfelt, “ _Congratulations_.” 

\---

Motherhood means waking at odd hours, accustomed to early morning feedings and a regularly interrupted sleep cycle. But tonight the monitor is quiet when she stirs. It is some dead hour, long before she needs to begin the day, and in her cozy little flat, all is still. A soft lamplight slips into her bedroom. 

She pads softly to the doorframe. A lovely mobile of the solar system courtesy of Greg Lestrade – ( _This one’s Earth!_ reads the label above the little blue and green ball third out from the sun. Below it, one reads _That’s for you and not the baby, Sherlock_ ) – rotates imperceptibly in the low light. Anna’s bassinet is empty, and the reason for its vacancy is spread out on her sofa, fast asleep. 

Toby curls comfortably on a pillow near his feet. Anna breathes softly, her hands clutching at the fabric of her father's shirt and head tucked under his chin. Sherlock anchors her against him with one hand, the other curled protectively around her skull. 

Molly holds the perfection of the moment close. Had she a mind palace of her own, it would be first among her treasures. 

\---

She insists on keeping her flat. She has an obligation to be a strong, resourceful role model to her daughter, and she’ll best do right by Anna as the professional, ever capable Dr. Molly Hooper and decidedly _not_ by becoming Sherlock’s part-time live-in, cook, maid, and therapist cum baby mama. However much she has bowed to him in the past, she’ll damn well hang on to some sense of independence. Of course, doesn’t mean people agree with her. Mrs. Hudson in particular, who complains bitterly that she never gets to see Anna. But Molly won't be swayed.

“Honestly, I don’t see what all the fuss is on about,” she grouses to Mary when she pops round with David for tea and playtime. “It’s not – I _am_ grateful for the way things are. He makes an effort, and he’s...oddly involved. More than I expected. Always talking to her. Reading. Teaching her things. It’s strange, and sort of... wonderful.” 

What Molly doesn’t mention is that, in point of fact, Sherlock visits most nights, or she does him, and that when he isn’t on a case, its rare he stays away. That from her vantage, domesticity looks as good on his broad shoulders as does a sheen of sweat or a good coat. That she knows the taste of his particular desire. That they didn’t stop sleeping together after she got pregnant. 

Mary eyes her. “You’re still shagging him, aren’t you?” 

A nervous smile. “Who says we were? You know him. Not exactly the type for dating.” 

“Uh, yeah, he is,” Mary corrects. “Only dates with him tend to involve murder and espionage rather than dinner and films. And you’re avoiding my question.” 

“I told you we aren't–” Molly starts. 

Mary gives her an impish grin and rolls her eyes. “Yeah, you did, love. But you also told people he was dead when he wasn’t, so, mmm, you’re record’s just a tad spotty.” 

“Right." Hard to argue, that. Mary taps her fingers. Molly bites her lip, then nods her assent. Emphatically.

“ _I knew it!_ ” Mary cries in delight. “You’re way too happy a new parent to _not_ be getting righteously fucked on a regular basis.” She glances down at her son, wincing. “Shit. Better not pick that one up when he decides to start talking.” They look at each other and both burst out laughing. On the whole, being a single mum isn’t so bad, Molly thinks. 

Well, semi-single.

\---

Anna is three months old when a minor thug called Alfie Howell breaks into her apartment and changes her mind. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t take his case, he explains from behind his gun. Molly grips the countertop behind her, her knuckles aching. The length of space of two small rooms – the distance between her and her daughter – has never loomed so long. 

“He’ll got no choice now, will ‘e,” Howell boasts, very much pleased by the creative flair of his ingenuity. He gestures with the gun at the kitchen table, where Molly’s phone sits, before turning it through the door to her living room and on the bassinet where Anna is, mercifully, asleep. “Let’s give ‘im a ring, love.” 

She scowls, taking a deep breath. Panic won’t do. “Sherlock,” she says when he picks up. 

There’s a silence on the end of the line. “You’re calling. You never call; you text because you know I prefer it. Molly, what’s wrong?” 

“There’s someone in my apartment, Sherlock. Says he knows you.” 

“Are you and Anna alright?” 

Howell grins. “Your birds is fine for now. But you, Mista Holmes, you’re gonna get to working and find my money. Else I might just lose my patience with Mummy, here. Be a shame to mark up that face in front of the little one, dontcha fink?” 

She sees fucking _red_.

He’s an idiot, and arrogant to boot. He's not expecting a fight from her. No one ever expects a fight from her; nice girls don't cause trouble. But Molly Hooper has spent too much time in the light of Sherlock Holmes and he’s burned the niceness out of her.

She needs only a second of her idiot captors inattention ( _that's my girl_ , she thinks when Anna starts wailing) to snatch a knife from the carving block her aunt gave her for Christmas some years ago. She never uses it. The blade is still very sharp.

She knows her way around a human body. One quick, hard jab and the knife slides neatly into Alfie Howell’s left lung. If he’s lucky the techs will arrive in time to intubate him before he drowns in his own blood. If not, well...He'll be unlucky, then. 

_Thank you, Aunt Grace_ , she thinks as he falls to the floor. She kicks the gun across the floor and drops the bloodied knife into the sink. Anna’s wailing has grown louder, as if sensing her mother’s distress and adding her own young but powerful voice in the attempts for help. Molly gathers her to her quickly, her shaking hands and arms holding her close, filling her nose with her sweet baby smell. 

The gurgling sound of Alfie Howell bleeding out on her floor cannot be ignored, however once Molly moves with Anna in the living room. With her daughter’s safety assured for now, her motherly instincts are assuaged enough that she could now focus on the call of her Hippocratic oath.

Grabbing a dish towel, Molly knelt down beside the bleeding man on her floor. This was a person that was dying and needed her help, not simply a person who had just threatened her and her child. She applied pressure on the wound. The crimson pool spreading across her kitchen tile is considerable, though she does her best to stop the bleeding 

The sirens of help grow louder in the distance. 

Molly did not wish for Alfie Howell to die, but she would later recall that she felt little remorse for her actions in the situation. He had threatened her daughter, and that had been the only thought that she’d been capable of processing in that moment. 

Hands brush hers away from the bleeding wound as emergency responders take over. An inspector she’s never met takes command of the scene. Everything seems out of focus until she feels a pair of rough hands pull her to her feet, the face of Sherlock Holmes the only clear thing in her vision. She’s never seen the look on his face before. 

“Never again,” she hears him say, and it sounds like he’s trying to make a promise.

And just like that, the cloud of shock lifts, and it all becomes clear again. Molly can hear Anna crying out for her and it takes Sherlock’s strength to hold her back. She’s about to claw his eyes out for keeping her there when he steers her to the sink, washing the blood of her hands and Molly manages to get control of herself again long enough to help him. As soon as the red is off, she’s rushing to the officer holding her baby, nearly snatching her away, holding her tightly against her chest until Molly feels like she can breathe again.

Sherlock is before her again, his hands over her shoulder and pressed against Anna’s back.

“Never again, Molly,” he repeats himself and now she has no doubt that he’s promising her something. “This will never happen again.” 

“You can’t promise me that,” Molly says. The sweet blow of Anna’s breath sends goosebumps along her shoulder. She has fallen back to sleep. Molly looks up, into his face, so beautiful and, times, so guarded. “Safety not guaranteed, Sherlock Holmes.”

He pauses, considering her words. “Then let me promise to always be there when you are in need of it,” he answers. She supposes that is the best he can offer. They look to their child, her eyes closed in sleep, occupied by dreams. 

This is how Sherlock Holmes convinces Molly Hooper to live with him at Baker Street.

\---

A few months later: 

“Oh, _hell_ ,” Sherlock says, rolling his eyes and collapsing back in his chair. “Really?” 

“Indeed,” Molly replies, overwhelmed. She sinks into the armchair opposite. 

“This is _your_ doing,” Sherlock scowls at Anna’s bassinet. “Entirely too much estrogen – _and_ oxytocin – in this flat.” 

Molly turns her chin in hand, meeting his eye. _Not good_. 

"Well,” he says eventually. “I suppose a second trial couldn’t hurt.” 

She shares the news with John over horrid coffee in the hospital caf some days later. “At least we know what to expect this time.” 

“Not exactly planned, I take it?” he asks. 

“Oh God,” Molly replies. She threads her fingers through her hair, feeling a bit hysterical. “Is any of it?” 

John Hooper Holmes is born six and a half months later. His elder sister greatly approves. 

\---

_Not long after Molly’s engagement dissolved, John went on honeymoon, leaving Sherlock temporarily without a shadow. He was not particularly aggrieved, however, at being forced to turn to Molly for help once more._

_“I need a companion,” he said, when met with her (rather weak) protestations concerning a marathon of Doctor Who. She snorted by way of response, but retrieved her awful scarf and tote.“What’s a madman with a cap over a madman with a box, I suppose.”_

_By the early hours of the next day, they’d ended up soaked to the bone, following a killer’s trail down the ancient course of the Fleet River, deep below London. In an unguarded moment, their quarry sprang from hiding and after knocking the gun from Sherlock’s hand, attempted to shatter his skull with lead piping._

_Molly shot the perpetrator at some miraculous middle distance, proving to have precision – chance though it may be – that went above and beyond her usual talents with a scalpel. (And even if she wasn’t nearly as good as John, well, then, John was usually able to properly see his targets, for the most part)._

_She looked horrified by her actions for one long, suspended moment as the sound of the gunshot rattled around in their ears, but recovered herself quickly._

_“Are you alright?” she’d asked, dropping to his side to assess him for injury._

_“Fine,” he replied as she helped him up. He found he was shocked as much by the sight of a weapon in the good Dr. Hooper’s hand as he was by the skill with which she had discharged it._

_“Lucky shot,” she says, her voice rising in question._

_“Yup.”_

_She considered it, stupefied. "Well,” she said, after a fact. “At least the autopsy will be easy.”_

_They looked at one another, and as he considered the tiny, bedraggled woman at his side who’d just saved his life (again), the absurdity of her statement came over him. He laughed. A low chuckle that grew louder, echoing through the old, unused places of London (and some parts of himself as well)._

_Molly stared, then smiled and shook her head. She let out a breath of relief, letting the some of the tension of their chase melt away. He pressed a kiss to her forehead._

_“Molly Hooper,” he smiled. “Pathologist by day, crack assassin by night. Well done.”_

_“No wonder John’s gone gray.” She tossed her scarf – by now beyond repair - into the Fleet, letting the dark, fetid waters carry it to places unknown. “This part-time work is terrible.”_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once more I must sing the praises of the amazing **[Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington)** for her awesome feedback. Shout out to my partner-in-crime **[olga_theodora](http://archiveofourown.org/users/olga_theodora/pseuds/olga_theodora)** for doing a pass as well (because I always, always, _always_ use too many commas). I make no apologies for the heaps of nods to other fandoms, films and tv shows in here, for I am mad lady and it amuses me to do so :D

_"So," she asked, standing in his dimlit kitchen. "How to do we, ah, proceed? Logistically, I mean. With options. How is this going to...work." She swallowed audibly._

_"Mmm," Sherlock hummed, noncommittal. "Pass me that,” he said, and pulled a secondary pair of lab goggles from the cabinet, handed them to her. He pointed between a graduated cylinder and a solution in an Erlenmeyer flask. “Complexometric titration.”_

_“Okay, which dye?”_

_“Eriochrome Black, over there.”_

_She set about the task. “It’s just, I don’t want you to feel compelled to do anything you don’t want to, and there’s certainly lots of, um, methods that we could use. If you haven’t reconsidered. Which I hope you haven’t, but if you did, I’d, well, I’d understand.”_

_“You’re rambling again.”_

_She was silent for a while. “I know I’m rambling. I don’t know why. I haven’t done that around you in years. I’m nervous. And...puzzled, I guess. About why you’re doing this.”_

_Molly looked over the table at him, hesitant._

_“Because I want to.”_

_She nodded, digesting that. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet and thoughtful, as if she was talking to herself. “It’s just–I never imagined that you’d want children of your own,” she said, finally._

_“I don’t,” Sherlock answered. As he spoke, the reaction in her flask began to take place. As usual, Molly’s measurements were spot-on. The blue-tinted solution turned totally colorless in an instant. Perfect compound stability._

_She frowned, more baffled than ever. He wasn’t saying it correctly; not good. Removed his goggles and hers, setting them aside. He looked into her face, trying for the words that would make her see as he saw. Make the solution clear. “I want yours.”_

_Molly’s confusion melted away. He kissed her._

\---

It’s evening when he arrives back at Baker Street. He has not been home for more than four days. Gradient light emanates from the bedroom, falling across the battered kitchen floor. He lingers in the bedroom doorway as if he were a visitor, not wanting to trespass on this moment’s territory. It’s been years now, but at times he still feels like he could not possibly belong to _this_. 

Molly sits against the headboard of their bed. Snuggled into the duvet, Jack snores softly to her left, one small fist against his mouth. On her right, Anna is curled against her thigh, her black hair fanned out, a corona of tangled darkness. Molly’s threadbare Cambridge t-shirt hangs off one shoulder. Her hodgepodge, make-do wardrobe has never improved; somehow the fact of it endears her more to him now, as do the running shorts and dark blue knee socks she’s wearing. 

He’s been gone for four days and on the far side of a frustrating case those socks do things to him that Smartwool should not inspire. He drinks in the details like a man deprived of water: Messy bun coupled with tortoiseshell glasses. Her tongue curling around a pen that hangs from one corner of her mouth. In her lap, a half-edited draft of the article she’s been working on for _Human Pathology_. 

However long Sherlock Holmes has called Baker Street home, it had never been the comfort, the refuge, that it is until now. _Until her_. He paces to the end of the bed, crouching at mattress level, steeples his hands below his chin, committing everything to his memories. 

"Did you solve it?" Molly asks, quietly, not looking up. 

"Yes." 

"Satisfied?" 

"As much as can be expected," he answers. And truthfully, though he craves it, the pleasure, the thrill of the chase, is not the rush it once was. Not when it keeps him away so much, for so long. Rising, he lifts Jack up, and slides in next to her. His son snuffles against his neck, turns over and breathes softly once more. 

"Time that one went down," she says, quiet. 

Sherlock Holmes has known Molly Hooper for seven years, eight months, seventeen days and some-odd hours. As she turns to him, she looks younger now, somehow. The soft light, perhaps, or maybe some factor that he’s not considered. Good genes. Facial creme. Happiness. 

He plucks the glasses off the bridge of her nose and kisses her deeply.

He did not ever, not _once_ , expect this.

\---

Being a parent is, in near to equal parts, at times messy, tiresome, frustrating and _noisy_ , but Sherlock also finds it full of unexpected pleasures. In short, he finds it to be interesting, for which he is immensely grateful, given that of all difficult situations he has sorted himself into, fatherhood would certainly prove the most impossible to extricate himself from. Not that he would dream of it. 

"Daddy." 

His daughter perches in the armchair once occupied by John Watson - which Anna regards purely as _her armchair_ , thank you very much - and peers at him over the pages of her book. In her calm, quiet ( _bored_ ) little-girl voice, she inquires, "May we have target practice now?" 

Sherlock’s eyes light up. "Love to, darling," he says, and all but leaps out of his chair. "Do you know, I think target practice is the best idea I've ever had." 

"It was my idea," she corrects, setting her book aside ( _Planetary geology? Useless. Boring. Frivolous._ ) climbing down to the floor. 

He gives her a deliberately puzzled look. "I’m sure it wasn’t," he teases. 

"Yes," she insists in her fiercest, crossest voice. "It _was_." He grins, delighted to see his daughter refusing to play the mousey part that her mother did for years around him. And hadn’t _that_ been a waste. 

He helps her into her coat before folding into his own. "Mittens, please," she says, pointing to the ones without fingers. She asks for the satchel on the shelf containing her blue pocket torch, map of London, sunglasses, magnifying lens, Oyster card, five quid, and her slingshot. "In case there is a crime," she explains. "And the Detective Inspector asks us to help." 

Times, he simply marvels at her perfection. 

"Anna, please do me a favor," Sherlock says, holding the door for her. 

"What?" She looks up at him, adjusting the deerstalker hat he gave her. 

Sherlock drops down to her eye level. "Never, _ever_ change." 

\---

John Watson has a running list of the most bizarre aspects of Sherlock Holmes’ experiment in parenthood. He is forever amending it, jostling the order around to account for some strange new oddity. Sitting on the sill at 221B – beside a tall, brightly decorated Christmas tree that, once, he would have bet his life would never be found in a flat also occupied by Sherlock Holmes – he mentally adds a new entry. _December the 25th_ , John thinks, _Mycroft’s unmitigated adoration of his niece and nephew._

"Uncle Mycroft!" Anna exclaims happily.

"Off," Jack agrees, reaching from his perch in Sherlock’s arms. 

"Children," Mycroft says, smiling. He pats their heads and looks genuinely pleased to greet them. "Enjoying your holiday?" 

"No," Anna says, ever blunt for a five-year-old. 

"Why not?" 

"David broke my torch," she scowls, her eyes flickering to John’s offending son, who is making his best attempt to extricate a rib from a man’s chest cavity. The game kept beeping. Right, so. Not a surgeon, probably. 

"Well that certainly wasn’t very kind of him," Mycroft answers with affront on his niece’s behalf. "What happened?" 

"He bit it." 

"Bit it, did you say?" 

Anna looks plaintively up at him, her lip wavering. _Brilliant play_ , John thinks. "I only wanted to see his intestines. Just a _little_."

John takes a sip of his whiskey and scowls at Sherlock. "It _would_ involve your daughter, my son getting his teeth knocked out of his head for the first time." 

Sherlock blinks slowly back at him, resting his chin on his son’s head. "Baby teeth fall out, John. He’ll be in perfect dental health in no time." 

_Bugger_ , John thinks. 

"You realize," Molly whispers later as Mycroft charms his way into Anna and David’s hearts with sugar, "your brother is teaching them to be his spies. Which, I might point out, may well end up a prelude to training them as _actual_ spies?" 

"Oh, I wouldn’t worry," Sherlock answers.

"Well done," Mycroft tells Anna after a game of deductions, slipping her a sweet. When her uncle reaches for his tea, Anna winks at her father, pocketing the candy. 

Sherlock grins, devious. "I believe we have the makings of at least one double agent." 

_God help us_ , John thinks.  


\--- 

From down the stairs in the living room, Molly can hear that negotiations with the devious mastermind are not going well. 

"Let us make a deal," Sherlock growls through his teeth. "I will tell you a story, after which you will go to bed _and remain in it_ for the duration of the night."

She suppresses a laugh, remembering the horrified look on his face when Jack had interrupted them the week before. 

Jack pushes back with his own terms. "I get to choose the story." 

"Suitable enough," Sherlock agrees.

"Tell me Star Wars." 

“No, films do not count as ‘bedtime stories,’" Sherlock says, annoyed. "Plus, dull. Chronicles of Narnia?" 

"No.”

“Where the Wild Things Are?” 

“We did that one last night.” 

"Fine, how about I _tell_ you a story.”

"One of your cases?" Jack mulls this idea over. 

"How about the time I went to Buckingham Palace naked?"

Jack huffs. "I know that one."

 _He does?_ Molly thinks. _I don’t even know that one._

"The case of the murderous, mystery hounds of Baskerville?"

“No.” 

"The time your mother dated a notorious criminal ringleader?" 

"NO!" Molly calls from the couch.

"Cases are boring," Jack decides. 

"Boring!?" 

"So boring." 

"Fine. No story. Just bed. Goodnight." 

"But our deal!"

"Let that be a lesson to get it in writing next time," Sherlock says. "Lest I get annoyed at you and reneg." He pauses a moment. "Goodnight, I love you." 

Jack’s only response it a groan of grumbled outrage.

 _Are you sure he’s my son?_ says the look on Sherlock’s face when he stalks down the stairs. 

"Did you really go to Buckingham Palace naked?" Molly asks, looking up from her email.

“Of course I did. Wanted to annoy Mycroft,” he explains. “Well, mostly naked,” he amends. “I had a sheet.” She gives him a dubious look to which he replies, “Ask John."

He eases into the couch beside her. For all the years he could flit about on caffeine alone for days on end, he’s taken to sleeping the grateful sleep of the parental whenever he can get it. He leans into her shoulder and murmurs against her bare skin. 

"Nicked an ashtray too." 

\---

Around the time she first encountered Sherlock Holmes, Molly Hooper’s life began to deviate from a well-ordered linear progress into wild curves with uncertain asymptotes. Where she once fallen somewhere in the vicinity of _nauseatingly average_ , she now exists purely in the realm of _utterly bizarre and occasionally infuriating but for the most part spectacularly wonderful._

Which is why she’s not entirely surprised to come up the stairs into her home to discover utter mayhem. "Sherlock, what in God’s name–” 

He has one of her scarves tied around his head and brandishes an umbrella (one rather suspiciously like Mycroft’s) like a rapier. Jack sits in the cutout door of a cardboard box covered in blue construction paper. His Darth Vader helmet reflects green when he thumbs his sonic screwdriver toward the ceiling. “We are pirates and sellswords, Molly!" Everything is in disarray. 

“Thought you were on a case?” She says, piling her things onto a kitchen chair. 

"Solved it. Ludicrously easy. Jack helped.” 

_Honest to God_. She takes a long deep breath. “Tell me you didn’t bring our four-year-old son to a crime scene.” 

He made a face. “Of course I didn’t.” 

_Good_.

“I brought _both_ of our children. I couldn’t very well leave Anna on her own.”

“You could,” Anna chimes from her hiding place behind the armchair. 

“I really couldn’t,” Sherlock insists. 

“Why?” 

Sherlock shrugs, hypothesizing. “You might drink acid.”

“Why would I drink acid?” Anna asks, finding his theory ridiculous. 

“I don’t know. That’s why I can’t leave you alone.” He smiles, proud, as if to say _Look at my very good parenting skills, Molly!_

Molly sighs, giving him a look of her own that says plainly, _We will discuss this later_. 

Anna jumps up on the chair, brandishes Captain America’s shield and yells, "IT’S SMAUG! THE DRAGON IS COMING!" 

"Come, Molly! Be a proper villain!" Sherlock calls, and leaps onto the couch, fending off an invisible beast. "God save the Queen!"

"God save the Queen!" His children holler, raising a charge up into his arms. 

No heart should be able to stand such joy, Molly Hooper thinks, and roars hers out as only a fire-breathing monster could. 

Though, if happiness could kill, no doubt Sherlock Holmes would discover precisely how. 

\---

It’s all the ways they _aren’t_ strange that are most interesting to John Watson. Sherlock has tea parties with his daughter, for one. As would most normal fathers. Almost. 

"Nice tutu," John says, pointedly. "Lovely eye-patch you’re sporting there, Anna." 

"Thank you," Sherlock says over the rim of his teacup. "Darling, say, ‘Thank you, John, my eye-patch is quite roguish, isn’t it?’" 

"Thank you, John," Anna Holmes says, absently. She’s far more concerned with mixing the exact proper amount of milk into her tea. Her parents’ child, clearly. 

"And you’re wearing a tutu why, exactly?" John asks. 

Sherlock sips his tea. "Why not? Why shouldn’t I wear a tutu? What do we say about men who wear tutus, Anna? Or women who choose to become pirates for that matter." 

"Gender is a construct," Anna says, primly setting a teacup in front of Buzz Lightyear, who is currently sporting Barbie’s feather boa. Presumably Barbie made a better Jedi Knight than a socialite, by the lightsaber taped to her plastic hand. 

John set his hands on his hips, shaking his head. "Empowered little one, isn’t she?" 

"Delightfully so," Sherlock grins. "I love parenthood. Molding young minds is fascinating, don’t you think?" 

"Just what I came here to talk to you about, actually." His mouth twitches as he figures out how to comport himself. "Apparently Anna and David had a bit of a run in last week." 

"A run in?" 

"A row. A tiff. A fight." 

"Did you?" Sherlock sets his tea down. Resting his elbows on his knees, he considers his daughter. Anna blinks at him, her expression inscrutable to John’s eyes, but clearly not to Sherlock. "Oh, Anna," he tuts. "Not nice." 

"It was just a _little_ snake," she protests. "I needed it for my experiment." 

"And what did you learn?" 

Anna makes a sour, snooty face. "Boys are daft." 

"True," Sherlock says, glancing at John, delighted. _She is fantastic! Is she not fantastic, John?_ his expression says. John shakes his head. _Not good._

Sherlock rolls his eyes, but seems to grasp his meaning. "But all the same," he amends. "David is your friend, and friends don’t do not nice things to one another. You’ll apologize to him."

"Fine," she says wearily, and holds out her hand. Sherlock passes her his mobile. 

"You’re a weird family," John says to Molly as she comes through the door with their youngest.

"We are, aren’t we?" Molly replies, looking quite pleased to say it. 

"Boom!" Jack says, from the kitchen. 

Molly’s happy expression flickers into a weary sort of amusement. "Excuse me. My son needs reminding about Rule #1 of 221B Baker St."

"Do unto others…?" John ventures. 

"No," Sherlock says, rounding the corner with Anna upside down over his shoulder, texting. He looks deeply annoyed. "No fires in rooms without fireplaces," he grumbles. "So unfair."

 _Should have thought of that one when I lived here_ , John thinks. 

\---

"Oh, sorry," Molly says to John, apologetic as she turns down dinner plans. "Ordinarily we’d love to join you, but it’s date night." 

"No, no problem," he says. Then, because he can’t just _not_ ask, says, "I’m sorry, I just...What do you do on date nights?"

Molly blinks. "Well. There’s the experiments. Sometimes Sherlock cooks. Play board games," she says, going through some mental list. "Whatever strikes the mood: Go on walking tours. Get me out of my clothes. Check his maths. Jiujitsu. Watch baby animal videos. It's sweet. Just lovely." She smiles brightly. 

John’s mouth forms words that make no sound. _How–? What–?_ It’s like his worldview has gone completely off-axis. White is black. Black is rainbows. England’s won the World Cup. 

Her tongue rolls against her cheek. He realizes she’s trying very hard not to laugh. 

Penny drops. "You," he says, exhaling through his nostrils, "are having me on."

"Yeah," Molly nods, her button nose scrunching in sympathy. 

"You _trolled_ me."

"I did. Tiny bit." She agrees.

He scowls and Molly smacks him in the leg, laughing. "John Watson! I mean really! _Walking tours?_ " She glances over to Sherlock. "You owe me a tenner.” 

"Ten points to Gryffindor," Sherlock says, and some far part of John’s mind finds it absolutely madly hilarious that the world’s only consulting detective reads Harry Potter. "Though the part about taking your clothes off was entirely accurate," Sherlock offers, not looking up from his experiment.

"I also check his maths. Usually in that order," Molly says, sounding smug. 

Aaaaand that was enough. "Right. Algorithmic pillow talk. Whatever. You two deserve each other. I’ll be going now." 

"Oh, but John," Molly says, earnestly. _Too_ earnestly. " _Do_ come by tomorrow night for dinner. Sherlock’s making paella!" She dissolves into laughter before she can finish. John rolls his eyes, gathers his coat and waves the pair of them off. 

"You're a corrupting influence, Sherlock," he calls. 

"Me?" Sherlock looks up sharply. "I hardly think that’s fair to say. Particularly concerning matters of virtue, which if we’re picking those apart, then she’s _by far_ the more–" 

"Not listening anymore!" John shakes his head and bounds down the stairs, quick as he can, doing his best to avoid thinking about what constitutes ‘date night’ in the Holmes-Hooper household. 

\---

The pair of them join forces on a carefully plotted and strategic initiative. Sherlock, overgrown child that he is, is instantly ready to give into their demands. He’s certainly the softer touch, of the two of them (though would be loathe to admit it). Molly, as per usual, isn’t quite as willing to cave. 

“I thought you weren’t supposed to negotiate with terrorists,” she says, getting ready for bed one evening. 

“Mmm, no,” Sherlock says over his phone. “You always negotiate with terrorists. Especially the terrorists who want puppies.” 

“Well I think you’re _barking_ to consider it,” she says to him, laughing at her own (admittedly terrible) joke. She can practically hear his eyes roll. 

It quickly becomes apparent that although their plan has thus far been unsuccessful, Anna and Jack have set in for a long campaign. By month three of the siege she’s almost ready to give in just to keep them from texting her – literally so – every five minutes. The phone bills have gotten outrageous. 

She must be losing her mind, she tells Mary over a glass of wine one evening. “Nah,” Mary says, grinning. “You lost that years ago. I’d say round the time you decided you’d rather get Sherlock in your knickers rather kick him out of your lab.” 

Mary is quite right, as usual. And so, Molly concedes her fight. 

"What do you think you’ll call him?" Sherlock asks, sitting on the floor with the newest member of Baker Street scampering around his new home. The black-furred pup trips over himself left and right, and before long has laid waste to an offending throw pillow, tearing it nearly in half. 

"Oh, I should think that would be obvious," Molly says from the door. 

Suddenly alert, he looks between her and the children. "Why?" Anna and Jack grin at one another, their typical _Dad’s missed something_ behavior. 

Sherlock relaxes. "Oh, wait, no. I don’t care. Nevermind." 

"No fun. Why the change of heart?" Anna pouts. 

"Something that the three of you see that I don’t." He rolls his eyes. "Has to be pop culture. _Please_ tell me its Kanye." 

"No. It’s got to be Ripper," Jack says. " _Obviously_." 

\---

"Mummy," Anna says, coming up to Molly in the kitchen. At seven years old, she is the picture of her father. Tall for her age, pale; quiet only to the edge of frustration, at which point her fits are impressive. But her daughter possesses emotional intelligence than Sherlock lacks, especially toward her brother, who she is both deeply protective of as well as his greatest tormenter. The birthright of eldest siblings.

"Jack has a photographic memory," Anna says, as if commenting on the weather or what she would like for her birthday. 

Sherlock catches her eye over the edge of his mobile. "Oh? Why do you think that?" Molly says, raising an eyebrow at him.

"I tested him. I showed him timetables. He remembered them all." 

"That’s not quite–"

"All nine hundred and eleven pages of the National Railway schedule." 

_Oh_ , she can practically hear Sherlock’s thoughts. _Interesting._

"I think we should be careful with him," Anna says. 

"What makes you say that, darling?" Molly asks, looking to her daughter’s composed, but concerned face. 

Anna’s slender shoulders lift in a shrug. "Some things would be bad to have in your head, always. Mean things," she says, looking pointedly at her father, whose cutting tone she has more than once observed. "And dead people," she says, looking pointedly at her mother, whose profession Anna has never enjoyed. "May I have a biscuit?" She asks, apropos of nothing. 

"Just the one," Molly answers, hugging her daughter to her side and ruffling her hair. Long and straight, like Molly’s own, though dark and thick, like Sherlock’s.

 _My strange and brilliant and totally bizarre children,_ Molly thinks. She catches herself saying it out loud to herself at times. It becomes kind of prayer. A substitute for the _So help me, Sherlock Holmes_ she used to mutter to herself while at Barts. But it’s also a statement of wonder. 

Mary Watson overhears her one day and laughs. "God knows they come by it honestly!" 

\---

"Got you a present."

He narrows his eyes. "Why?" 

"Because I like you, on occasion," Molly says. 

Sherlock shrugs. "I might feel something in the way of similarity. On occasion." His mouth twists in a smile. "Shall we swap?" 

Molly has half a mind to tease him about sentimentality but she bites her lip and holds her tongue, choosing instead to savour the moment rather than harp on its rarity. "Let’s." 

He presents her with a file folder as she hands him a plain white envelope. No wristwatches and jewelry for them. Sherlock grabs a dagger from the shelf and methodically tears into it. She waits, wanting to watch him work it out. 

"Tickets to…" He looks up, no doubt calculating the exact degree of smug enjoyment on her face. " _Three_ ticket to Les Mis. But they’re not for me and not for you, are they," he says. 

"Nope," Molly smiles. 

"One is for Jack. One is for Anna."

"Who has recently developed _such_ an interest in musical theater that she knows every–"

"–ghastly–"

"–word of every–"

"– _horrid_ –"

"–song." 

She grins. "And the last one is for dear Uncle Mycroft , who just couldn’t say no when Anna _begged_ him to be their chaperone. For Thursday next. Happy non-versary." 

Sherlock makes a ferocious noise and tackles her off the chair. "Oh, I do love you when you are _wicked_ ," he growls against her throat. "Scoundrels?"

"221C. Schoolwork. Which they never actually have to do, it would seem. So watching Netflix, I’d expect. They ended season two of _Battlestar Galactica_ yesterday evening, and the first half of the season three is notoriously good. Two-part premiere at 43 minutes each, factor in Jack’s obsession with pilots and Anna’s obsession with space means they probably have three episodes minimum in them today. Won’t be hungry because of the the biscuits they nicked from the kitchen after they got home…" she glances at her watch. "So, we should have an hour and forty minutes to ourselves." 

She wraps her arms around his neck. "Also for good measure, I locked them out." 

"Molly Hooper." He presses his forehead to hers. "You are brilliant."

"Not exactly the science of deduction, but logistics I can manage." Bending down, he scoops her up. "Wait, I didn’t get to open your gift," she objects. 

"Doesn’t matter. Yours is better," Sherlock grunts, carrying her to the bedroom.

"But I want to know what mine is!"

"Deed," he says, depositing her on the bed and attempting to divest her of her clothes. 

"Deed?" She repeats, words muffled against his mouth. "As in something you’ve done or something you’ve owned?" Molly asks, kicking her jeans off and lifting her sweater over her head.

"Something _we_ own, as a matter of fact," Sherlock grins, crawling over her, tracing a fingertip from her ankle to her throat before threading his fingers in her hair.

Her skin flushes with desire, but she manages a hoarse, "What?"

"221 Baker Street." 

\---

"No, it’s not," Jack states, letting Ripper off his leash. 

"Yes, it is," Anna argues. 

"It’s really not." 

"It _really_ is." 

Molly looks wearily up at him. "Will they _ever_ get tired of bickering?" 

Sherlock clasps his hands behind his back. "Oh, I imagine around the same time Mycroft and I tire of it. Which is to say, never." 

Molly’s eyes crinkle. Her eyes follow her children as they wander the path ahead, transfixed. "Do you ever look at them and wonder," she asks, learning into Sherlock, "how it is that they could possibly belong to you?" There are times she sees so little of herself in her children. It's how they hold themselves with such easy grace and poise, possessing casual self-awareness and natural confidence, too. It’s a joy and a marvel, and a puzzle. Such is life. Especially theirs. 

Ripper sets off after a pigeon, and Anna tears after him like a comet, her brother close on her tail. They tackle him into a pile of leaves, giggling and laughing in the last rays of the autumn sunshine. David Watson leaps into the fray, sending Anna head over heels. He and Jack bury her under a deluge of leaves. For a moment they are almost hard to see, the air around them is so full of bright, flashing fall colors and the sinking, golden glare of sun. The park is loud with their laughter. Mary and John wave from down the path, approaching. Between them, their absurdist tornado of children. 

Sherlock squeezes her hand, that enigmatic smile at the corner of his mouth. "Constantly," he replies. 

\---

_"Hi," she said. Molly tossed her hat on the chair. “Back.”_

_"Any stunningly helpful recommendations on procreation from the good doctor this time?" Sherlock turned off his blowtorch and looked up, a set of tongs in one hand._

_"No." Molly folded her hands across her middle, swallowing._

_He paused. "No?"_

_"No," she said, and bit her lip._

_"I thought–" He frowned, considering his words. "I thought, being a fertility expert, he’d have some actual expertise to call on. No?”_

_"No."_

_"Then what use is he?" Sherlock said, annoyed._

_She took a short, desperate little breath.. "You misunderstand. He didn’t have anything to offer because–" The shock fell away, and she felt, oh, just,_ filled _by the joy of it. "I didn’t need it. I’m pregnant."_

 _He stared at her, confused. She burst a little with laughter, both at his face and at the whole idea of it all. Of him standing here in his lounge, in his housecoat and doing mad science things with tongs, here in the kitchen. Meanwhile another, very small mad scientist was at work growing inside her. Molly laughed, because –_ oh fuck, this is really happening, _she thought - what else could she do?_

_Sherlock remained silent._

_"Just so you know, he sometimes does this thing,” John had told her once, early on. “When he can’t handle an emotion, it’s like his mental bandwidth gets all tied up. His brain is basically buffering, I think.”_

_Molly wiped at her eyes, and turned on the tea kettle. Some cells had merged and divided in her uterus, and life with this bizarre and brilliant man was not going to change because of it. In all likelihood her life would only exponentially become more bizarre. She smiled, dialed down the gas flow on the bunsen burner. More brilliant._

_After a moment, he shook his head and, throwing his tongs and blowtorch aside, bodily forced her out of the kitchen and slammed the lounge doors closed._

_"Out!"_

_"Why?"_

_"Chemicals!"_

_"What are–"_

_"OUT!"_

_He slammed the second kitchen door._

_"You ruined your experiments," she said, sometime later, after he’d sealed up the hydrochloric acid, poured beakers of an array of colors down the drain and blow-torched the contents of several dozen petri dishes full of God-knew-what. He slid in next to her on the sofa and Molly perched her chin upon his shoulder._

_"As it happens, I have a better one in progress," he said. And smiled. It struck suddenly her then that what he meant was not simply getting pregnant: it was having a child. With her. That he meant to be a part of all this. She marveled at the wonder of it._

_He tucked her hair behind her ear, still smiling, but just barely. It was more in his eyes than the curve of his mouth. She was reminded so clearly of that day he’d taken her to solve crimes, after he’d returned from the dead._

_"Congratulations, Molly Hooper," he said. This impossible, impossible man._

_"And to you, Sherlock," she said, gazing up at him. They had never given a name to what it was between them; perhaps there wasn’t one. Nonetheless, their combination had been a transformative one. She was a stronger sort of Molly; he’d become a more open, more changeable man. Someone able to bend, able to give._

_Her leaned over and kissed her, a soft, sweet brushing of lips that seemed almost dreamlike, and so romantic. She’d never imagined him kissing like this, before._

_How can this be, Molly Hooper thought to herself, climbing properly into his lap, slipping her arms around his neck and snogging him senseless. How in the world can this be?_

_Sherlock Holmes, for once, had no objections._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anna and David are eight, Jack seven, when the odd, insular order of their world falls apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear, I'm so sorry. I can't really believe how long it's been since I updated this. I am the worst. Don't fret: This story remains near and dear to my heart and I will see it finished. Promise. As always comments and kind words are the magic fairy dust that help make Tinkerbells fly and fanfic writers finish their WIPs. Thanks for hanging in there, gang. You won't have to wait so long for the next update! As ever, all my love to the wonderful **[Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington)** for her brilliant beta job! All errors are results of my own tweaks and changes.

\---

_When it came to Sherlock Holmes, "experimenting" covered all manner of sins._

_He lifted her on the countertop, pinning her below him so her head was up against the wall between the underused range and a cupboard full of empty chemical detritus. She swung one leg over his shoulder, fingertips of one hand pressed hard into the skin of her hip. With his other he was slowly driving her mad._

_Molly rolled her hips against his thumb, desperate for greater stimulation than the selfish bastard was willing to provide at the moment. A low, frustrated keening sound ripped from her throat as he reached up her skirt, running his long, perfect fingers against her clit, teasing her very, very deliberately. He at least had the sense to undo her bright blue polka dotted blouse, the one that’s filled out nicely since her breasts all but doubled in size, and seemed content to devour her undoing with his eyes._

_"Sherlock," she gasped as he slipped one,_ one _, finger just barely inside her._

_"More?" he asked. His voice was teasing, but she could hear the catch in his throat, the husky wanting he did not admit to. Not to anyone but her._

_"Ooh, yes," Molly gasped. His other hand slid up from her hip, drawing feather light patterns over the small swell of her stomach. She arched against him, gasping a short, shuddering breath that caught half in her throat. Bliss that it was, she couldn’t wait. She couldn’t go without a moment longer. Her hands scrabbled desperately at him, making quick work of his trousers and pants. Face to face, he held her eyes, and the intensity of it was somehow even more profound than the feeling of him filling her._

_It had shocked her, this. Even after she got pregnant, he still showed up at her door on nights when she was cold and lonely. He was ready with mouthwash in hand after the worst of the morning sickness hit, and within reach when the hormones had her dizzy with desire. He was there when she was sore and tired, and deeply, alarmingly happy._

_He sighed into her mouth, his earlier teasing gone, replaced by a languid tenderness that passed between them in long, slow kisses and easy, unhurried movement. It was nothing like the raw kinetic rush of that first time, back when they had so much to learn about each other, and with him working against a fairly steep learning curve. But he was a quick study, the clever boy. By the way he touched her now, she’d swear he had committed her every nerve ending to memory. "Yes," she groaned again, her teeth scraping his shoulder. He slid his tongue along her collarbone and neck. Her bare feet gripped at his hips, tugging him closer, to the edge of his control, to the edge of hers._

_I am so screwed, Molly thought, breathless. It couldn’t last, she told herself. She couldn’t dare to dream it._

_Could she?_

\---

Anna and David are eight, Jack seven, when the odd, insular order of their world falls apart. 

Like so many cases, it begins with a text.

From: AHH  
Message sent 15:34

_WH7689 hel0_

Sherlock Holmes rises from his chair in a sudden, leonine movement. He stares at the screen, stricken. Possibilities riot through his mind: a string of endless alphanumeric permutations and their variable likelihoods. _Call_. Anna’s mobile does not pick up. Jack’s goes straight to voice messaging. Disconcertingly, so does David Watson’s. 

Something is wrong. He has a line to his brother in seconds. 

“Mycroft,” he says as he races to the desk, calling up the GPS locator tool on his laptop. The locator beacon hovers on the last known location of Jack and Anna’s mobiles–Baker Street–as it recalculates the new positioning. 

“Sherlock to what–”

The image location resolves...definitely not on the children’s school grounds. 

“ _Regina_.” He all but shouts the code word they decided upon nearly a decade before. “For God’s sakes, Mycroft: _Regina_.”

Silence hangs on the end of the line for endless, interminable seconds. “Regina is go.” 

A feeling of deep fear settles in the pit of his stomach at the slight waver in his brother’s voice. _The British Government is afraid_. 

“Tell me everything you know.” 

\---

The facts are these:

One. His children have been stolen from their school grounds in the broad, bustling daylight of Central London. As has David Watson.

Two. CCTV footage shows an unidentifiable man driving a gray lorry from the premises in the moments after he received Anna’s text. The vehicle license matches the string of numbers and letters in Anna’s text.

Three. Their mobiles, along with backpacks and shoes have located via GPS in a meadow in Barnes Common, far from the Hammersmith grounds of Latymer Upper School. 

Four. Sherlock Holmes has many enemies, but few so bold as to attempt something so foolish as kidnapping Mycroft Holmes’ niece and nephew. It only takes one to try. 

(Five. He cannot look his best friend or his wife–cannot look Molly–in the eye.)

\---

Molly Hooper’s short nails press hard into the skin of her arms, leaving crescent moons that bloom bright with blood. She paces the floor of Greg Lestrade’s office, incapable of remaining still. She feels hollowed out. Boneless and weak, her head cloudy and out of focus. Her head aches. Her mind whirls, scattered and desperate. She feels, in the same moment, as though she is ten drinks in, as well as the horrible weight of the morning after. Madness, she thinks. I’m going to go insane.

From the moment she saw him shove through the lab door, hours earlier that afternoon, she knew. She has always been able to see the emotions Sherlock Holmes was unable to voice, and in that moment, his silence had been _screaming_. 

She balls her hands in futile fists, throat aching under the strain of wanting very much to cry her heart out, and not. 

Something of this magnitude has been coming for a long time, lingering out of sight, over the horizon, in other hours and days and years. Waiting for the opportune moment to destroy the life they have built. Mary brings her a cup of tea that she does not want, and hovers by her side as they stare through the glass windows to the operations room. 

By all outward appearances, Mary Watson and Molly Hooper are very different women—extrovert vs introvert; trained disconnection vs inherent empathy; blonde vs brunette; Stones vs Beatles. It was a small wonder of the universe that they chanced to love the men they did, as the great friendship between John and Sherlock allowed them to discover one of their own.

Sisters, Meena had told her during on some long-forgotten occasion when she was, at once, both supremely grateful for and deeply aggravated by her elder sibling, were extraordinary people in the sense that they almost always had several hundred thousand ways of illustrating just how wildly, utterly, _maddeningly_ different they were from you. And yet by some miracle could always be counted on, could always be called upon to demonstrate their true and meaningful qualities that revealed the myriad differences for what they really were: insignificant. 

Molly reaches out to her friend–the closest thing to a sister she will ever have–and takes her hand hand, gripping it hard. Mary does not react for a long, silent moment. The deadly calm that has radiated off her in the last, long and terrible hours gives way. Mary turns, and Molly sees all that is tearing through her echoed back in the look they exchange. Any words they might say are pointless; there is nothing that can do justice to the primal, desperate hurricane of fear and rage and hurt battering at heart, mind, and soul. Molly is painfully aware of all that she has taken for granted each day for the last ten years. 

She wants to straighten the knocker of 221, and rise the steps to a messy flat, with Jack splayed out on the sofa, foot tapping time on the arm while he devours a trashy pulp-crime novel or the life story of Billy the Kid. A sucker for Westerns her son. She wants David to bound up the stairs with his parents in tow. She wants Anna to follow, dramatically sinking into a chair and groaning in soreness from her martial arts class until David and Jack distract her with some new game of their own devising, or campy old episodes of classic sci-fi programmes they’ve dug up online. 

She wants Anna to threaten to use what’s she’s learned in krav maga or muy thai on her brother. 

She wants Jack to blare Scandinavian death metal and Korean pop to annoy his sister. 

She wants David to charm them all back into each other’s good graces with his great humor and quick laugh. 

She wants Sherlock to antagonize them with his oddly sweet and bratty brand of intellectual affection as he deduces how they’ve (mis)spent their days. 

She wants John and Mary bickering in the background, gently teasing each other as is their manner, and Mrs. Hudson puttering around, clucking at them all. 

Because, anything else is simply unimaginable. Anything else—

She bends at the waist, unable to _breathe_. 

“We’ll find them,” Mary says, squeezing her shoulder, unwilling to let go. “I swear to God Molly,” she sucks in a breath, promising. _Promising_. “We _will_. And if I personally have to pull the trigger, I will end whoever is responsible. That’s a promise.” Molly bites her lip, holding in the staggering forces of grief tearing through her. She wants to believe her friend. 

But Molly Hooper also remembers the fear in Sherlock Holmes eyes the day a very stupid and very desperate man tried to use her and Anna as leverage against him. She is certain the people who have stolen her children are nothing like Alfie Howell had been. Are not stupid. Are not desperate. Sherlock made her a promise once, too:

 _I may not always be able to guarantee your safety_ , he had told her. _But let me promise to always be there when you are in need of it._

More than anything, she wants to believe in Sherlock Holmes. 

\---

The Kamorovskii crime ring was, truly, a spectacular one. And not just for the scale, but for the creativity of their business operations. The tip from Mycroft that had brought Sherlock and he onto the case several years before had surfaced numerous misdeeds: the disappearance of a London hip-hop producer who had an increasingly profitable side business in narcotics; a tawdry sex club that had aimed for high-end and fell short in so many tragic and uncomfortable ways; coercion, blackmail, rape, bribery, the list went on.

One of the key players had been Yuri Kamorovskii, an arrogant, thirty-year-old former welterweight boxer with a big mouth and bigger chip on his shoulder. For his many crimes (stupidity being chief among of them, Sherlock had tastelessly pointed out on the stand), Yuri Kamorovskii had gone to prison following a lengthy trial and unsuccessful appeals process eight months before. 

His elder brother had not been happy with the outcome; he was even less happy when his little brother was killed in a prison riot not three weeks after his sentencing. Vasily Kamorovskii did not forget those who slighted him. And he especially did not forget those who were responsible for the incarceration resulting in a gruesome jailhouse end for his little _mishka_. Shivs were not made for a quick, painless death, and his brother had not died one. 

Vasily Kamorovskii hates his best friend, John Watson can tell. He can see it in the man’s pale, flinty eyes. 

“What can I do for you, Mr. Holmes?” 

His English, John notes, is impeccable. Only the barest trace of an accent to be found at the curving edges and sharp corners of his words. It is a soft voice, but serious, and utterly without warmth. John hears winter in Kamorovskii’s words. He hears ice and indifference and long, cold wars. 

“I will only ask once: Where are they?” Sherlock demands. 

Vasily Kamorovskii says something to his bodyguard in Russian, shrugs. “I have no idea what you mean.” 

“This will end badly for you,” Sherlock promises.

“You were familiar, I think, with my brother. You knew him. You sent him to prison, in fact.”

“His _crimes_ sent him to prison.” 

“Which you uncovered. And lead to his death.” 

“Then perhaps you should not have made such an incompetent your second in command,” Sherlock spits, teeth clenched. 

He rolls a toothpick in his mouth. “You took a thing I loved. My brother. My father’s last boy. His pride. You took that from my family.” 

“Now look. The man broke the law in a dozen different ways,” John says, shaking with rage. “The only thing you can hold us accountable for is having the nerve to take on a amoral gang of thugs and hustlers without the slightest sense of moral decency. We did not hold a knife to your brother’s throat. We pulled no trigger. And we sure as hell didn’t stab him in the back. We took _nothing from you_!” he shouts. 

“I am sorry for your problem, Doctor Watson, Mr. Holmes,” Kamorovskii sneers. “I am sure you will find your children. Perhaps they are already in, ah, _a better place_ , I think you say.” 

_An eye for an eye_ , is Kamorovskii’s message. _My pain for yours_. John is blind with rage. He is not alone.

In all the years he has known Sherlock Holmes, he has never seen his friend burn with such fervent, violent frenzy as he does for the twenty-seven hours it takes to recover their children. He is commanding. He is vicious and hard and utterly single-minded in his pursuit. The darkness that Sally Donovan had warned him about long ago takes hold, burning below a deceptively calm surface. Sherlock’s rage is an Old Testament thing, cold and terrible and utterly brutal. It is, John sees, a glimpse of another man, shades of might-have-been. 

A subtle hint is more than Mycroft needs to assemble a task force operation worthy of a minor international dispute. (Which, technically, John supposes, it is.) Within minutes agents scramble intel on Komarovskii’s ring: his dealings, his associates, his places of “business.” Within hours they’ve located the security camera van in the parking garage of a half-demolished hotel in Mayfair that has been undergoing renovations since the previous autumn.

And that is where Sherlock takes matters into his own hands. 

\---

In truth, he does not regret shooting their minder. Another half a second and the man would have not hesitated to turn his OTs-23 Drotik submachine pistol on the room and emptied his clip. And so Sherlock Holmes cannot bring himself to care much about the bullet to the brain that put an end to those plans. 

But he wishes his daughter had not witnessed it. 

“You killed him!” Anna screams. Her hands are clamped over her brothers ears. She hugs him close, keeping him from seeing the sight before her wide and terrified eyes. “You killed him!” she shrieks again. Sherlock is frozen in place, shocked by her fear of him. 

John pushes past, rushing to her side, checking them over for injuries. “Anna. Anna, look at me. Where is David. Where did they take him?” 

She seems not to have heard him at all, and stares at Sherlock, cowering, her small face streaked with tears. She has her mother’s eyes, large and dark. There is a pain in him he cannot name. He wants to approach his children, to wrap them both in his arms and promise they are safe, but the force of Anna’s fear keeps him from moving. He feels...wrong. It is all wrong. 

“ _Where did they take him?_ ” John says again. 

“Up,” Jack says, voice shaking. He swallows fast, tears in his eyes and trying so hard to be brave. “They went up the stairs.” 

“Of course if would be the roof. Psychopaths and roofs,” John hisses. 

The sound of running footsteps echo from the hall. Sherlock turns away. 

Greg Lestrade and a group of NSY rush into the room behind them. “For fuck’s sake, Sherlock. I _fucking_ told you to _wait on us_.” He seethes through his teeth and looks like he might have an aneurysm. Entirely possible he might. “Just once–just _once_. Christ, will you _never_ listen?!” 

“He’s on the roof. Is tactical in place?” he asks quickly. 

“Are you evening listening?!” Lestrade bellows. 

It is Sally Donovan who answers. “Buildings north, west, south and south-east. Clear shots on all sides if you can get him dead center.”

Sherlock nods to Sally Donovan. “Get them out of here _now_.”

\---

Later, there is blood on his hands and ash drifting on the air. In the flashing red-blue lights of the police cars and ambulances, the children’s faces are bled of color, their expressions achingly empty. David Watson is alive and well, gripping John's hand like a lifeline. 

Sherlock's mind races—a rush of thoughts, memories, feelings, _sentiments_. He feels crushed by the weight of it: the resounding failure to solve a case; the shame of miscalculation; the grief of losses he might have prevented. Each, only a thousand times over, and combined. A torment beyond reckoning. His _children_. They are wearing blankets. They are in shock. The terrible look of fear has not left Anna's eyes. 

Watching them from a darkness beyond the reach of flashing squad cards lights, Sherlock Holmes does the only thing he can do for them.

He leaves. 

\---

“Where is he?” Molly Hooper demands. Her long hair sticks out from beneath her wool cap in disarray. Three days. He is surprised it took her this long. “Mycroft, where is he?”

“On assignment.” 

She gasps in something like mirth. “On assignment. _On assignment?_ ” She cuts off abruptly, her jaw working in rage. She lifts her eyes to the ceiling and takes a forcible breath to calm herself. “Why? What could be so important that you need him _now_? I have two traumatized children at home. Three, seeing as they refuse to leave David. They need their father, Mycroft." Softer, she adds, " _I_ need him. So I will only ask one more time: Where. Is. He?” 

_Oh Sherlock_. Mycroft Holmes presses the pads of his fingers together. If only the considerable reach of his power extended just that much further to his brother, how much easier his life would have been. “Believe me, Molly, when I tell you that in this matter I took no joy in co-opting my brother's services. And please trust me when I tell you I have only ever had his interests at heart.” 

She is silent, furious. “Then why?” she spits. 

“Because he asked. Out of fear of the alternative.” 

“I...I don’t understand,” Molly Hooper stutters. Her brows knit in confusion. “I don't understand what he could have asked of you.” 

He stands behind his desk and tells her, regretfully, “The one thing I could never deny him.” 

\---

He lies to his brother, claiming without the work he'll be in danger of relapsing. Once granted, under Mycroft’s begrudging orders he (grimly, _purposefully_ ) dismantles what is left of the Russian cell. It is not a good day to be criminal in Nizhny Novgorod once Sherlock Holmes is through dealing with the Kamorovskii syndicate. He thought it would be enough. That, once dispatched, the feeling would abate. 

_(You killed him!)_

It does not. He asks another assignment of his brother. Then another...

Time drifts. Month after month of an unbroken, neon subcontinental nightmare: Singapore and Taipei and Kuala Lumpur, all clouded and shimmering in the gray, vegetal haze of the Southeast Asian rainy season. 

_Please,_ Molly begs; John commands; Mary threatens. Anna and Jack and David, they all plead. He deletes every message, unable to face them. His mind howls, and memories cling to him like a damp shirt. The rush of emotion is so dense and packed – rage atop guilt beside fear – and they blur together and invade his mind and body much as does the smog in Beijing. It is suffocating, a dark, lingering miasma that leaves him ill for weeks. The work is the only respite, and his need for it as desperate and all-consuming as his need for heroin and cocaine once was. He stays far from London, and when he begins to dream the streets and tunnels and towers he knows better than his own face, he meanders through unfamiliar city after unfamiliar city, seeking their opposite. 

Sherlock tells himself he does not see his son in slight, quick-moving footballers playing make-do games in bombed out lots and filthy streets. He is not reminded of his daughter when he watches a man lifts a small girl into his arms, her curtain of long black hair falling across his shoulder. He does not think of Molly when bright-lipped whores catcall from sweaty corners on nights drenched in neon and nicotine. Not the warm comfort of her breathing, the splay of her hair across his chest. Not the smallest upturning of her mouth, not the smile in her eyes, not the curve of her ear, like a seashell, delicate and pink. 

On every night, in every city, he does not think of them, of _her_ , of home.

\---

_“You killed them!”_

_“You killed them!”_

_Anna’s voice echoes echoes echoesechoesechoes. “You killed them!”_

__(Not so much ‘given up’–) __

_Blood on the floor. Blood everywhere. Anna and Jack his children David dead eyes open, unseeing—_

_No no no no no John’s son his son their sons his children Molly’s children_

__(–just sorted my priorities, I suppose.) __

_Molly_

_Molly_

_Molly!_

_Her children, dead dead Molly’s DEAD_

__(I want yours.) __

_Blood on his hands, hate in Molly’s eyes —_

_SLAP!_

_SLAP!_

_SLAP!_

_—John's eyes Mary Mycroft Mummy_ _hate HATE **HATE** —_

He comes violently awake, suddenly gasping for air. Without conscious thought he bolts out of bed, collapses to the dirty floor, gasping. Sweat pours off him in rivulets. His heart hammering in his chest like a war drum. 

Sherlock Holmes clenches his fists, wills the panic down. The memories of that night he cannot delete. He cannot. He does not deserve to live without them. 

And so, when sleep claims him, the terrible accusation, each time: 

_You killed him_ , she said. 

_You killed them_ , he hears. 

He almost had. 

\---

Six months pass by, each heavier than the last. He easily, gratefully, even, loses grasp of time. There’s the work, and it devours him outright. Missing diplomats in Jakarta. A minor CIA incursion in Seoul. Organ trafficking in Bishkek. Imprisoned British nationals in Manila. He takes every case, no matter how boring, how dull, how idiotic and useless and _demeaning_ because it keeps him and his terrible Schwarzschild radius of danger and destruction far from the people he has hurt the most. 

October. He’s in Phnom Phen, holed up outside a brothel fronting much more illicit exchanges when he checks his mobile and realizes: He has missed Anna's birthday. 

Unbidden, memories of the day she was born flash in his mind: Molly’s great resolve and practiced calm over forty-eight long hours of labor. His own uncertainty, anxiety and fear. The mesmerizing way his daugher had looked at him, exactly twenty-four seconds after she came into the world, strangely quiet and assessing him with huge curious eyes. 

Nine years since that day, when his life changed forever. He feels the press of each one, and suddenly feels very old. He is not yet fifty, and somehow feels the age of the universe. 

A text from Molly awaits him the following morning: _She didn't cry when you weren't here_ , she writes. _I did, Sherlock._

Less than two months later he misses Jack's birthday, and with it Christmas. Just as he has summer holidays, his parents silver anniversary, and the date Molly first learned she was pregnant—the day they’ve claimed as something close to special. Something entirely their own. 

There are no texts. 

\---

He’s in a dive in Hanoi, complete with misanthropic owner; creaking ceiling fan; telly blaring Vietnamese commercials between dubbed, heavily edited versions of American comedies, when Mycroft sits down across the greasy formica table, slides an envelope and a thumb drive toward him and says, “So, brother dear. Your next assignment.” 

Sherlock does raise his head. He swirls the tea in his chipped china mug. “What, no harassment this time? No, ‘How much longer, Sherlock?’ No, ‘Remedy this situation, Sherlock.’ No, ‘ _Fix your family, Sherlock_.’”

“No.” 

“Why? You’ve always _loved_ pointing out my moral failings,” he growls, sliding his fingers against his three-day-old scruff. 

His brother hesitates, folds his hands atop his umbrella handle. An empty, interminable silence hangs between them. Eventually, Mycroft looks up and says with no trace of enjoyment. “Because I am no longer certain you can.” 

\---

He shows up at the door on a wet February night, wearing rain in his hair and sadness just the same. There are bright threads of silver at this temples that hadn't been there when she saw him last. 

Molly stares, frozen by the shock of him. Deeply conflicting emotions rips through her. The flood of relief is overpowering ( _Alive alive he’s alive_ ), as is the altogether violent rush of anger. A fractured silence hangs between them, filled solely by the heaviness of unspoken things and the cold crying of the winter wind tearing through the heart of London. 

She feels an overwhelming sense of déjà vu standing here before him shaking with rage and disappointment. Molly cannot bring herself to speak, too afraid that if she lets out so much as a squeak of all the anguish she’s felt in the last eleven months, she will end up striking him the way she once had years before when she learned he was using again. If she speaks, it might break the last levee, and her heart would empty out right there on the steps of Baker Street. 

Instead she leads him upstairs, where his children go wild eyed at the sight. They sob in his arms, begging Sherlock Holmes for answers that for once, he does not have. When their tears abate, they grow strangely shy in their father’s presence. Molly presses a shaking hand to her throat at the awkwardness. Though she can hardly blame them, her children are not accustomed to self-consciousness, and wear it all the worse for it. She listens from the landing as Sherlock carries them to bed, telling them he will still be there when they wake. 

“Promise?” she hears Jack ask.

“Promise.” 

She waits. She breathes slowly, steeling herself. When the door closes, he descends the stairs to the kitchen. She raises her chin and calmly tells him, "You may leave now.”

He blinks quickly. “Molly–”

"We will not discuss this, Sherlock,” she says, her usual warmth and cheer replaced by cold fury. “I will only say this once and then you will go. You will not be allowed in this house until I know everything. If you have been been using again–”

“I haven’t.” 

“You will prove it. And then you will tell me _why_.” 

He hesitates. His features are carefully schooled, but there is a lost, panicked look in his eyes. “I realize that you deserve some manner of an explanation–”

She turns away, gripping the sink. “Please leave, Sherlock.”

"I said I would be here.”

“Then come back,” she says, not quite looking over her shoulder. “Come back, tomorrow. Otherwise, don’t. Go. Do whatever you want, but you have to _choose_. You can’t keep doing this: leaving us behind and running away. I would rather them remember the father they love and struggle to understand his choices than to suffer through your abandonment again.”

“Abandoned? It was not– I never– ” He falters. So many emotions Sherlock Holmes could never fully understand, least of all his own. His expression is at once annoyed and confused and sad. He steps in close, reaches for her hands and holding them in his own in the space between them. In his larger ones, they seem so small. Once, he had always been able to make her feel small. She will never let him get away with that again. "Please, Molly, I am their _father_ ,” he implores. 

Molly wrenches from his grasp. “That may be, Sherlock.” Her throat constricts as she says it, the words a struggle to get out. "But you are _not_ my husband.” 

To that, he has no reply. 

\---

_”Sherlock?” He heard her feet on the stairs. A second later, Molly appeared in the kitchen, shrugging out of her coat and turning to the entrance to the living room. “What was it you wanted–” As she caught sight of his parents, she stopped, looking to him with brows furrowed in confusion. Her hands self-consciously came to her middle, resting atop the small swell of her belly._

_“Mummy. Father. Dr. Molly Hooper,” he said, stepping to her side to make the introduction._

_His mother smiled. “Hello, dear. Lovely to meet another of Sherlock’s friends.”_

_“Um, hello.”_

_“Molly is thirty-three; a graduate of Cambridge and St. Bart’s Hospital, where she is currently employed as senior Specialist Registrar. She has aided me in many of my cases, offering medical, biological and chemical consultation and assistance. She is, at the moment, fourteen weeks pregnant with our child. Her areas of expertise include biochemistry and–”_

_“What?” Mummy demanded._

_Sherlock blinked. “–histopathology. Tissue and human ligamenture,” he clarified._

_“Not that, Sherlock,” his father cut in. “You said she was–”_

_“Pregnant.” Molly interrupted, smiling shyly. “Yes. Um, I wanted a baby. Your son–” She bit her lip, looking up, then down again, wringing her hands. “He knew how happy it would make me.”_

_“A grandchild?” Mummy said, gazing in wonder. She clasped a hand to her mouth. “Oh. Oh!” she managed, pressing her other hand against her heart. “Sherlock. I cannot believe it!”_

_She rose to her feet and instantly threw her arms around Molly, who recovered from her shock after a moment enough to return the embrace. “My God in heaven, darling girl. Come sit. You have no idea how desperately I have longed for this day.”_

_“We thought it would never come,” his father said, astonished. He settled on Molly’s other side, so she was tucked between his parents, bright-eyed and beaming._

_“And here we just assumed you preferred men. Like your brother,” Mummy said with teary sniffle. She pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped at her eyes._

_“Mmm, no. I do not share his sexual preferences, nor do I ever want to think of ‘Mycroft’ and anything remotely ‘sexual’ in the same thought process ever again. I’ll be deleting that,” he said, frowning._

_Molly smirked.“Wait, Mycroft is–”_

_“Gay as a picnic.”_

_Molly snorted the most indelicate of sounds at his father’s terrible phrasing, prompting Sherlock to point out their shared affinity for very bad jokes._

_“Oh, I don’t know how you put up with him,” Mummy said, shaking her head.“You must have the patience of a saint,” she said._

_“Mmm, something like that,” Sherlock agreed, settling back in his chair. Astonishment flashed across Molly’s face at the compliment. Little time to dwell on it though, as she was suddenly the subject of Mummy’s fierce and adoring attention once more._

_As he watched the scene unfold, it occurred to him how foreign this exchange must be for Molly. Her own mother had died in childbirth; her father, not long after she’d gone to university. She had made her own way in the world for a long time without parental figures; Truthfully, she had no real need of them. But she had very much missed them, that much had been apparent._

_His mother clasped her hands around Molly’s, as if afraid she might vanish at any moment, taking the dream of her grandchild away. His father placed a hand upon her shoulder, silent as he so often was, wholly content in his joy._

_Sherlock feigned disinterest. He steepled his hands as if submitting to his mind palace while Mummy spouted nonsense questions at a subject who could scarcely get a word in edgewise. But his eyes remained open and fixed on Molly Hooper, who wanted more than anything to have a family._

\---


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It is more difficult coming back to London than it had been ten years before, and infinitely harder to reenter his life and the roles he previously held in it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The longest chapter to date! Kudos to **[Amalia Kensington](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington)** for her stellar (and speedy!) beta work on this. She takes my rubbish, holds me accountable, corrects my pronouns, deletes the typos and pretty much makes everything I scribble down one thousand times better.

_“So.”_

_“So?”_

_“Almost there.”_

_“Y-es.”_

_“So I thought we’d just have a chat–”_

_“Mmm, nope.”_

_“Sorry?”_

_“John, although you have, from the first, demonstrated no small amount of skepticism regarding my ‘experiment’ with Molly Hooper, I assure you I am fully prepared. I’ve done the research. I know the facts, necessary precautions, social expectations and developmental needs. Look, I’ve an app. I’ve two apps!” He waved his phone._

_“Yeah, thanks, genius. That’s not quite what I was getting at.” John inhaled, breathing out through his nose and trying for patience. “What I mean is: Are you emotionally prepared for what you’re about to face?”_

_“Emotionally?”_

_“Yes. Boy, girl, tiny good-natured robot—In a few months a miniaturized version of you will be scurrying about the world, crawling up lab benches and God knows what else. It’s hard. Incredibly hard. That much feeling, mate. It’s just—”_

_“Not worried,” Sherlock said._

_“You should be.”_

_Sherlock looked at him with consternation. “As always John, you’re overlooking the obvious.”_

_“Oh? What’s that?”_

_And with that he stood quickly, eyes widening in emphasis, “I’ve got Molly.”_  
  
\---

It is more difficult coming back to London than it had been ten years before, and infinitely harder to reenter his life and the roles he previously held in it. 

He passes a sleepless night at the Diogenes, enduring his brother’s scorn and Andrea’s artificial calm before returning to Baker street, where Mrs. Hudson shakes her fist, uttering a string of half-Spanish curses, and slams the front door in his face, (just as she does for the next month whenever she chances to catch sight of him). He takes that to mean he’s not yet welcome. 

At NSY, Lestrade has nothing to say to say to him. Won’t give him any work, either. “You got a more important job right now,” Lestrade says, shoving a finger his chest, telling him to go home. “I don’t want to see your face until you’ve gotten down on your knees and begged–and I mean begged, Sherlock, _begged_ –that woman for forgiveness. ” 

Sally Donovan, now a Detective Inspector in her own right, calls him a piss poor excuse for a man and a human being. Not for the first time, she is completely correct. He’s reminded of Mycroft, the erstwhile architect of his escape, but who’d regarded him with barely disguised contempt. Of all his ‘people,’ only Phillip Anderson seems to offer anything in the way of sympathy, though it seems more out of obligation than anything else. 

And then there is John. John, whom he sought second only to Molly, and who looked at him with such fury and bitter disappointment. He shook his head, so overwhelmed with disgust that he didn’t bother throwing punches this time. (Mary had gotten one in, and with a better right hook than John.) 

Logically, he knows what they suspect, evidenced by demands for bloodwork and hair samples and a corroborated account of his locations, travails, activities. He wordlessly submits, providing the necessary samples and requests to Andrea to validate the dates and locations of his numerous assignments.

“Just,” John seethes, four days after he’s returned, when the last of the tests and confirmations from MI6 have been forwarded to Baker Street. “Just–God! _Why_ , Sherlock?” 

“Because I had to _do_ something, John. I couldn’t rest, could not stop until that organization that threatened our children’s lives was utterly undone.”

From his armchair, John shakes his head, mouth curving with his pensive smile-that-isn’t, and looks at Sherlock as though he hardly recognizes him. “That’s not what I meant, mate.” 

Even after she’s read the files and the tests confirm that he’s been clean, Molly doesn't say more than a few words to him for weeks. She puts on a good face for the sake of Jack and David and Anna, but the space between them echoes across unquantifiable distance. Once, twice, he catches sight of her clenched fists and worried mouth, and is painfully reminded of the awkward young woman she’d once been, fighting between her desire to speak her mind and her inclination to slam a door in his face. 

It is a hard winter, one that stretches out before them all like black ice on an unfamiliar road. 

Anna Holmes, ever her father’s daughter, regards him with a set of mercurial, closely-guarded emotions, flashing from one to the next at near to lightspeed. Chief among them is resentment. She has been altered by the events of the past year. Since he’s seen her last, her impish, bossy qualities have taken on a hard edge. She is flinty, competitive, and does not take well to change.

Molly holds out just-rinsed teapot and tray. “Jack, take these down to Mrs. Hudson, please.” 

“I’ll do it,” Anna interrupts, glancing at Sherlock with contempt, eager to leave the room. “I’m faster, anyway,” she says, dismissive. 

( _You killed him_ , she repeats, screaming in every room of his mind palace. Eyes wild; terrified. _You killed him!_ )

Jack ignores the dig, content to spoon more cereal into his mouth. The tray is heavy and awkward in her thin arms. Sherlock moves to help her. “Here, let me–”

“I don’t need _your_ help,” Anna snaps, shoving past him with a scowl. She hasn’t addressed him directly yet, refusing to meet his eyes or refer to him by any name. “None of us need you,” she spits, and thunders down the stairs. 

Molly meets his eye briefly. Her expression softens, but she says nothing, and follows Anna down the stairs. 

“Is she always that nasty?” he asks Jack, sitting across from his son with a small sigh. 

“No, not usually,” Jack answers slowly. The _only around you_ goes unspoken. Sherlock hears it anyway.

And so the high tide of reconciliation that had come in so slowly it scarcely seemed to advance at all, goes out again in the blink of an eye.

\---

The viciousness in Anna’s barbs and the pain of Molly’s silences weigh heavily on him. He's lying on the sofa at half past midnight when his brooding is interrupted by the sounds of a small figure creeping down the stairs. 

“We stopped playing it.” Jack says, tiptoeing to the sofa. Ripper is curled up before a low-burning fire, and they sit side by side, feet splayed out on the coffee table. 

Sherlock smiles, takes a deep breath and attempts to push his melancholy away. On a road paved by cold nights and gray, empty days, his son’s unyielding warmth has been his saving grace. He is his mother’s son, truly, though still undamaged by the doubt and heartache he’s thrust upon Molly. “Playing what?” he asks, putting his arm around his eight-year-old youngest. 

“The song.” He mimes a guitar, fingers finding the invisible chords. 

“Song?” 

“Ours. ‘Queen of the Savages.’ The one you were humming,” Jack says. 

_Oh._ He hadn’t realized. 

“It made Mum sad, though. So I learned some new ones.” His son lays his head against his shoulder, chattering quietly about his musical accomplishments. Sherlock leans his head against Jack’s, holding him close, content to listen. Words and melodies well to the surface of his mind; memories that haunted him in all the miserable spaces of the last months: Filthy dive bars in Bangalore; broken Afghan-constructed housing complexes; a dank squat in Hanoi; a half-dead fishing vessel in Jakarta. All manner of terrible places where, broken, grief-stricken, he’d weighed the best parts of his life against the worst, choked by the fear that he would never do right by his children. His friends. His– 

_Molly._

It is a hard winter. The loneliest of his life. 

\---

Ten months after he left, Molly had gone on two dates with a nice doctor from UCL whom she met at a conference at the Royal Free. Jonathan was sweet and funny and asked after the children. He had an older son who has just started university in Norwich. He was on good terms with his ex-wife. He ordered the salmon and decent wine and saw her to a cab. He was breathtakingly average and so utterly normal—and she broke down in tears on Mary Watson’s shoulder fifteen minutes after he had bid her goodnight. 

"I know, love," Mary said, rubbing soothing circles on her back. "I know." 

"He _abandoned_ us," she sniffled. "How can it be so hard to move on?"

"Darling," Mary said, ever the pragmatist. "I've got news for you. We all made this choice. A life with Sherlock. All of us. Even me, because I could never have been happy with John if I wasn't happy with his best man." She stroked Molly’s back soothingly, "I’m not making excuses. He’s appalling, and selfish. But...you knew what you were in for. You knew the child he is below that too-big brain that’s never done anything but bring him trouble."

John brought her tea, set it on the end table, and scooted a chair in close. "I know. I know the heartbreak he’s caused. I do. But. _But_.” His eyes softened. “You’ve a life together, Molly. Jack and Anna, and Baker Street...Once he’s gotten it through his head that that’s the best thing he’s ever done, he’ll be back." He leaned close and clasping her hands in his own. "Even after this, after all we’ve been through, it would be such a _colossal_ tragedy to just...let it all go." 

And Molly had sniffled, wiping the tears from her eyes. She composed herself a moment, drawing in a great breath. "No,” she said, resigned to her decision. She shook her head, rueful. _Goddamn that man_. “The tragedy is that I couldn’t.” 

Now, months later, and weeks since he’d showed up at the door to Baker Street, hair flecked with gray and more lines than she’d remembered at his eyes, the weight of that decision has been pressing on her, holding her down like a stone to a river bed, violent currents of emotion rushing chaotically around her.

Her phone buzzes. _Wagamama + Fringe. Mad science to follow? Have MOD on speed dial._

She grins, about to set her mobile aside when it buzzes once more. 

_You can do it babe. Love love love you._ She smiles again, this time inwardly, giving thanks to whatever mad cosmic being was responsible for bringing Mary Watson into their lives. Steeling herself, she closes the hallway doors and turns to the man poised in his chair, eyes closed in concentration. 

“We need to talk.” She perches on the arm of the sofa, folds her hands, waits. 

Sherlock opens his eyes, snapping to attention. He sits up, considers her. “I am listening.” 

Molly looks at the hands in her lap, tracing the curve of her index finger with the other. “The first time you left, after the fall, long before all this, I could take it. The silence, wondering and watching and waiting, and without any sign that you were alive or would ever be coming home. It was awful. I don’t think I ever told you that. Even knowing you weren’t– That you trusted _me_ , of all people. And still. It was hell, Sherlock. The lying and pretending and uncertainty. All of it was so, so hard.” 

She clenches her jaw. “But this–”

“I know.” His eyes fall away. 

“Let me finish.” 

“Molly, it would be helpful if you let me explain that I needed–

And then, like a dam bursting, the torrent of emotion breaks out of her with a terrible and shocking velocity. " _They_ needed you!" she shouts. "We _all_ needed you, Sherlock. Your children, your _family_ required you. Here! And you _left_ us. Do you know what that did to them? To us?”

“You of all people should know how my mind works,” he counters, springing to his feet. “I needed a _distraction_. The work. Something I could throw myself into–”

“Don’t do that,” she hisses, eyes narrowing at his justifications and knowing them as the excuses they truly were. “Don’t you _dare_ do that.” She felt like a live wire pulled taut; tensing, flexing, ready to break under the energy and the strain. “It _wasn’t_ about the work; you’ve always _had_ the work. I have never once in all these years asked you to stop being the great Consulting Detective,” she spits. “I’ve never held you back from the cases. You still flit about, days and nights, up and down the country, across Europe, around the bloody world if it pleases you. And if you have chosen to be here more often than not, then I’ve counted my blessings and what it has meant to your children and this family that you are. But never, _ever_ try to blame me – blame _us_ – for keeping you from what your gifts allow you do.” 

Countless times in the last year, Molly Hooper has contemplated the odds of their relationship surviving this latest terrible breach of trust. She has despaired and raged and _ached_ over his absence, more than once contemplating the idea of leaving Baker Street with her children altogether. But still, she held on to a thin, blue hope that when he returned, they would be able to move forward together.

Their future hanging in the balance, she waits once more. 

\---

In the living room of 221B, Sherlock Holmes falls quiet under the force of Molly Hooper’s ire. He cannot remember a time when he has seen such anger unleashed. They had fought many times; so often over the many risks the worked involved over their shared years together, but even through their worst disagreement, Molly had met him with a quiet understanding, a stoic determination, and the resolve to see him through. Well, barring one ill-advised lapse into heroin…he touches his chin at the memory. 

“You didn’t leave for _the work_ ,” Molly continues. “You ran away because you were fucking terrified, Sherlock.” 

He watches the way she holds herself in check, keeping a distance between them, wringing and gesturing with her hands, not knowing what to do with them. She bites her lip. “But we were hurt too. You weren’t there for all the nights I stayed up with one or both or all of them, sobbing and inconsolably afraid. And yes, David, too. Not about guns or bad men or the evils of the world, but _afraid for you_ , for their father. Because I couldn’t promise them you would be back. I couldn't explain to them why you weren't here.” 

“There were so many nightmares. And shock and outbursts and therapists. But they’re strong, and we’ve always told them about the dangers that exist in our deeply complicated life. They have John and Mary and Mrs. Hudson to help them through. Their uncle and their grandparents, all their friends. They are smart and capable and so loved by everyone in their lives, and they’ll get through it. They deserved to have you take part in that.”

She hesitates. “And you deserved it too. They almost–” She grimaces, pressing her hand to her mouth a moment. “Sherlock, they _almost_.”

( _You killed him!_ )

"I know.” The shame. Guilt. Anger. Recrimination. “Molly.” He sinks to the chair, runs his shaky hands through his hair. “I know it was my fault. What I am. What I do." 

A strange, dawning look. Something registers in her features. _Surprise?_ “You are spectacularly missing the point. Even if that _were_ the case—which it most assuredly is not,” Molly says, kneeling beside him. "Sherlock, I loved you anyway. I _had children_ with you anyway. Wouldn't that make me equally responsible?" 

“Of course not,” he scoffs, turning away. 

“You must understand—I don’t blame you for what _happened_ to them,” Molly says, very slowly. She touches his face, and he dares to meet her eyes. "You did _exactly_ what you always promised me you would: You helped. You found them. You brought them home safe." 

“But you broke our hearts when you _left_. And worse of all, you kept all your own fear and grief to yourself. _You_ deserved to heal, too. And you owed it to your children to show them the strength that takes."

The low flames are reflected in her dark irises; there is fire in her eyes. She draws a breath. "Sherlock Holmes, in all these years I have never asked you for something you were not already prepared to give. But you will do this for me. You will _make this vow_ ," she says, voice slowing, intimating at an old promise, the first of its kind he'd ever made, and his supposed last. “Promise me, Sherlock. Never again.” 

What more can he say? What more can he do to prove that if there is anyone who can make him a good man again, it is her. He leans his forehead to her. His throat aches under the great force of all his suppressed emotion. “I promise.” 

She gathers him in her arms. He feels the press of her wet cheek against his collar. 

“I love you,” he swears. “That has never changed.” 

“I know,” she says, releasing him. “That’s what makes it so much worse.” 

\---

A great many things have been altered in the time he’s been away. Sherlock stares at the email on his phone from Jack and Anna’s school, confused. “Why are there two Mr. Hazads at Latymer?” 

Over her tablet and a pile of notes, Molly looks up at him. “What?” 

He indicates toward his phone. “Either there are two of them, or the administration has recently favored a far more more progressive educational model—unlikely at best.” He frowns. “Or they...share an instructor? But why?” 

Molly looks back to Mr. Alan Foyle’s post-examination write-up. “Because they're in the same class.”

Frowns again. “No they aren't.” 

“Yes, they are,” Molly repeats, returning to her tablet. “Jack was moved up.”

“Jack was moved up, but not Anna?” He scoffs, offended on his daughter’s behalf. “That makes no sense. Jack has superior natural intelligence, but puts far less effort into schoolwork. Given her dedication and obsessive compulsion to best him, Anna should have been a candidate for promotion as well. So why didn’t they bump her up as well?” 

Molly taps at her screen. 

“Molly,” he badgers, “why wasn’t Anna advanced?” 

With a huff of annoyance, she sets her tablet down and rubs her temples. “I can’t prove it, mind, but yes, the proctors _did_ have her take an upper level proficiency exam.” 

“And?” 

“And, she failed by just enough to disqualify herself; I suspect she gamed the system,” Molly says. “I didn’t test positive for the deceit gene, so she must have gotten it from you.” There is no bitterness in her voice, but the remark is not the casual, teasing quip it might once have been. 

He looks away, focusing on the question at hand. “Why? She wouldn’t want to be held back. She’ll go mad.” 

“No, she won’t,” Molly answers, attempting to keep her cool. “She doesn’t ‘go mad’ if she isn’t given a problem to work through. She has patience–well, some; when she chooses to– and plenty of interests to occupy her time.” She pauses, rolling her pen in her hand. “She gets anxious around strangers. She didn’t want to start over in a new class filled with unfamiliar faces. Jack might be an unending source of competition but he’s also a steadying presence. David, too. And Gemma and Min-yi and Laura, and all her other friends. She didn’t want to leave them behind just because she’s smarter than everyone.” 

“That is…”

Molly narrows her eyes at him. “Sentimental? Trite? _Foolish_?”

Sherlock looks away. “‘Understandable,’ I was going to say.” 

\---

Anna Holmes frowns. “Why is _he_ here?” 

“We were _all_ invited,” her mother replies.

Anna’s eyes narrow, flicking over her father in distaste. She wishes he’d never come back. “No. It’s David’s party. He’ll ruin it. He always ruins it.” 

“Anna!” Molly exclaims, whirling around to angrily stare at her daughter. 

Anna looks at her spitefully. " _You’re_ worse than him. You're an idiot for staying. He won’t even marry you. He’ll leave. He’ll _relapse_ or, or–something. He says he won’t do it again. And he _always does it again_. I’ve read about him. I know about his drugs and his other girlfriends and –”

“ _Anna Hooper Holmes_.” Mary Watson sidesteps past her mother, roaring into the fold. “You do _not_ know.” She glares daggers, keeping her voice powerfully measured. “Upstairs. There will be no arguing. You will go to David’s room. _Now_.” 

Anna stares up in shock for a long moment, unaccustomed to anything other than the sly, wicked, _awesome_ Mary. She scowls at the authoritarian who apparently has stepped in her godmother’s shoes. “Fine,” she spits, throwing her tablet into the armchair. “FINE! I don’t care about him!” 

She slams the door angrily and sends a plastic Chitauri battle-droid flying across the room with a well placed _khao yao_ kick. 

Her phone buzzes. “Sorry I wrecked your party,” she grumbles into the pillow, holding it out so small camera can catch her face. 

"You shouldn't have said that,” David says to her over FaceTime. 

"Go away.” 

"He saved my life, Ace. He saved _your_ life." 

"And then he _left_ us.” More defensively. “He got _tired_ of us. And he killed that man.” 

"A kidnapping tosser who probably did a lot worse to a lot of people. You saw the articles online about it. Also, my dad was in the army. He’s killed people. So have Greg and Sally and your uncle." 

She scowls. "Not the same." 

"You're being stupid." 

“You’re being a _dick_.” 

“Seriously,” David deadpans. “You know who you sound like, right?” 

Anna grits her teeth; he sounds just like bloody Mary. “Go away, David!” She switches the video off and hurls her phone across the room at his beanbag chair in abject frustration. It would be so much better if Mum just left. If she would just have some sense, maybe they could just be _normal_? 

Mary raps at the door, a plate in hand. “I come bearing cake.” 

“Not hungry,” Anna huffs.

“Aww, chicky. Can’t fool me. No matter what your father says, you’ll need your strength if you want to keep up performances like that one. I’d know. Seen him eat half his weight in tikka enough times.” 

Anna scowls and turns over, her back to Mary. 

“Kiddo. I know as well as anyone he can be a jerk. And I how badly it hurt when he left. But I do promise, he’s seen his mistakes for what they are. And what they’ve cost him.” 

David’s bedding is covered with rocketships and constellations. She traces the lines of Pegasus between the stars. “I’m so mad at him,” she says, fingers digging into the pillow. 

Mary leans on her arm, and running a hand through Anna’s long hair and curling around her. "I know. It’s okay. I am too. But you can’t always be angry, or it will just keep on hurting.” 

“Why did he go away?” she whispers, turning over. Why won’t someone explain? She’s desperate for answers. “Why did he _leave_ us?” she pleads, looking up at Mary. 

“Just because he’s smarter than just about everyone doesn’t mean he has any grasp of emotional intelligence.” Mary sighs. “He loved your Mum for years before he was able to find the words to say it. For him, the most difficult things in the world to understand will always be what comes easiest to most people. Friendship. Trust. Love.” She pauses, tips her head to the side. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but he’s a bit of an idiot.” 

Anna’s mouth quirks up, but she tries to hide it. “Massive idiot. Sometimes.” 

“Yeah. He’s not perfect. Guess what, sweet pea? Me either. Or John or Mrs. Hudson or even your dear, dear uncle," Mary says, tapping Anna’s nose “We make mistakes. We’re all idiots in our own ways, Anna Holmes.” 

“Mum especially.” Her nostrils flare as she screws up her mouth. 

Mary snuggles down into the pillow. “You know, I honestly can’t decide if she’s the wisest person I know, or the biggest fool of the lot.” 

A small smile. "What's that say about me?" 

Mary grins. “Everything, chicky. Everything. Now let’s eat my son’s birthday cake so he’s none left to rot those teeth out of his head.” 

\---

He finds Sherlock smoking on the stoop. For all of Anna’s anger at her father these days, they are so incredibly alike, and never more so than in their lesser qualities. Both are petulant, easily offended, and prone to hurtful outbursts. Sherlock takes a long drag. "You were right John.” 

“First time for everything, I suppose,” he jokes. 

“Indeed.” 

“Not the being right bit, the you admitting it part.” 

Sherlock gives him a look. _Sure. That._ He looks away. “I made a gross miscalculation at the start of all this."

“Start of what?” 

"Ten years ago you tried, as my friend, to reach out and give some very sound advice. I did not give it the value it deserved, and for that I am truly sorry."

John shakes his head. “Look, she’s pissed. And I don’t blame her. We all were, and frankly you deserve it. But Sherlock, it’s not too late.” 

“Mycroft says it is.” 

“Your brother’s wrong.” 

“He’s never–”

“Yes, he is. You know how I know that?” 

“How?” 

“‘Caring isn’t an advantage.’ His favorite aphorism.” 

“Yes?” Sherlock’s eyebrows raise in genuine confusion. 

John grips his friend’s shoulder. “Sherlock, you cared about my son. And that saved his life.” 

\---

A shout jolts her out of sleep. A shout, and a crash from the living room Molly startles awake, blinking furiously. She bolts out of bed in a panic, her blood pressure rising at the myriad possibilities awaiting her. Her heart aches at what she does find. 

Sherlock flails wildly, falling to the floor. “No, no!” he shouts at some unseen torment. He stumbles through the darkness, tangling in a blanket upon the carpet. His hands scrabble at the floor, searching. She realizes he’s still half asleep, still caught in the nightmare. 

She slips to the floor beside him, wraps her arms around his shaking frame. “It’s okay, I have you. We have you. You’re home. Safe.”

“Safe?” he croaks. “They’re safe?” 

His face is wet with silent tears, his body shaking. She pulls him against her, forcibly, and Sherlock finally relents. She runs her hands through his hair, making soft, soothing sounds as he snakes his arms around her waist and buries his head against her belly. He shakes terribly, and holding on to her for dear life. The worst of the tremors fading, she helps him to his feet and pulls him with her to bed. And for the first time in ever so long, he falls asleep in Molly’s arms, holding onto her as if his life depended on it. 

\---

Sherlock is considering her very-well organized Google Calendar, mystified by the sheer number of interests that his children have developed in a year’s time; the volume of clubs, sports and classes appears to have quadrupled. “I’m not sure they have enough activities. They have a whole twenty-five minutes free next Tuesday.” 

“Before or after Dr. Langdon?” Molly looks up, surprised. “Oh, you were making a joke.” 

“Therapy…” he grumbles, tossing the phone on one of the lab work stations. 

Molly looks at him pointedly. “Yes. _Therapy_. They don’t go as much anymore, but they’re normal children who were exposed to very real trauma. You can't treat them differently, Sherlock.” 

"They _are_ different," he protests airly. 

"No," she says with a small sigh. _Disappointed?_ "They really are not. How is it you of all people don’t see that?" 

\---

Winter passes into spring and Molly’s words ( _her disappointment_ ) linger in his mind. He watches. He gathers data and considers her point. Slowly, the truth behind her words begins to sink in. Molly Hooper is deft at sidestepping her children’s casual genius (she has, after all, had a great deal of practical experience in the matter) to the point where she is able to encourage and nourish it, but without calling attention to it. And, though they learn like breathing – reflexive; beyond their control – their children are anything but atypical: They read John Green books and the Hunger Games, listen to pop music that irritates him to no end. They bicker and laugh and make up games on the Tube. Ciphers and cryptographic codes (thanks to Mycroft; or, on second thought, perhaps Mary) anagrams and mathematical puzzles in place of _Angry Birds_ (sometimes) or _I Spy_ , but they are games, and Anna never ceases to sulk when she loses to David Watson or her younger brother. They are, by rights, brilliant, devious, irksome. But mostly, they are _normal_. In every way that children are. 

His greatest surprise of all is not in the ways that they have changed in the year he has been gone, which is to be expected, but how much they have developed as individuals in that time. They less like children and more like...small persons. 

His children are growing up, Sherlock Holmes begins to realize. And much too fast for his liking. 

Jack plays football (not badly, but not well) and is in every musical group and society available to his age group. Anna acts in school plays (her lines are always perfectly accurate, though her delivery leaves something to be desired) and is a minor force of nature in mixed martial arts. Most amazingly of all, unlike his own childhood, they have no issue relating to other children. They have a hundred friends (whose names he _probably_ should remember) and make play dates and watch terrible television. 

 

They have bad habits and impulse control issues:

Sherlock frowns. “There is an arrow in your closet door.” 

Anna touches the screen of her upright tablet, swiping to a new problem set without raising her head. “It was raining.” 

“Mmm, which explains why you made your door a target _how_ , exactly?” 

She looks up, annoyance written across her face. “Obviously because I didn’t want to get _wet_.”

 

They fight over walking the dog:

“Jack will take him.” 

“I did it this morning, you do it.” 

“Ripper, go to Jack.” 

“Ripper, _go away_!” 

“‘All children should have dogs,’ he said,” mutters Molly Hooper, taking the leash off the hook. “‘They’ll go everywhere with him,’ he said.”

 

They fight over how to take the stairs: 

“ _Move!_ ” 

“ _You_ move.” 

“Your stupid guitar-thing is in the way.” 

“It’s bass! You can’t tell a bass from a guitar!? What’s wrong with you?”

“Shut _up_.” 

“Are you blind? They don’t even have the same number of _strings_.”

“I don’t care if it has eleventy-seven strings and is bedazzled with the bloody Crown Jewels. _It’s in my way_.” 

“‘Of course I want babies,’ I said,” mutters Molly Hooper, placing herself bodily between them. “‘Children would make me _so_ happy,’ I said.”

 

They fight over the proper German cognate for ‘subterranean,’ West Ham vs. Arsenal, and which Hogwarts House they belong to on some idiotic website: 

“Let me guess: You got Sorted into Slytherin. I _knew_ it.”

“Better than being a Hufflepuff.”

“Gryffindor, actually. _Not that there’s anything wrong with being a Hufflepuff_ , Mum,” Jack says in an exaggerated tone of lovingkindness. “Even if auspiciously awful Anna thinks there is.” 

“So says my baby brother, the appallingly alliterative arse–,” Anna grumbles under her breath, eyes glued to her tablet, as ever. 

“My sweet, verbose darlings,” Molly quips from her seat on the kitchen floor. She sets her wrench aside and retrieves a petri dish from the cabinet, makes some scrapings from beneath the sink. “Interesting mold here, Sherlock,” she says without glancing at him. “Have a look.”

Jack grins, shaking his head. “Mum, I love you, but you are _really_ weird sometimes.” 

Molly meets his sunny smile with its mirror image. “Explains where you get it from then, doesn’t it?”

From the sofa, Anna cackles mischievously.

 

They have useless, dull hobbies:

"We’re one galaxy out of billions. Circling one sun out of _trillions_ ," Anna marvels, rewatching a remake of _Cosmos_ from some years back. 

He rolls his eyes. "So they say." 

Anna looks sharply at him, indignant. "It’s true.” 

"Sure. But does it matter?" he asks, ever the devil’s advocate. 

" _Yes_." 

He waves a hand, dismissive. "What possible relevance does it have in your life. Why is it somehow significant if we sit at the center of the universe or some other bit of matter and energy?" 

The look Anna gives him is derisive but also...sad? 

"It matters," she says, "because we _don’t_."

\---

“Why are _you_ here?” she scowls. 

“Mmm, pretty sure I read somewhere that parental responsibilities include posting bail.” 

“I don’t need _bailing out_ ,” she sniffs. “This isn’t prison.” 

“No, not at all.” He takes a seat beside her crossing his ankle over his knee, gaze sweeping down the hallway of austere, high-paneled walls and ornate, closed doors. “You’re just forced to wear uniforms, have little to no control over your daily schedule, and answer to the whims of an authority figure whose _literal_ position is...?”

Anna shifts her jaw in annoyance. 

“Oh, right—Warden. Be grateful you aren’t boarding. Speaking from experience, the metaphor is all the more suffocating.” He folds his hands in his lap. “So?”

“So what?” 

“Why am I here?” 

“Why don’t you just deduce it,” she grumbles, refusing to look at him. 

“Because I’d rather you tell me.” 

She purses her lips, playing with the hem of her skirt. A bright blue ribbon has come out of its bow in her hair. He turns her shoulder and reties it. Better. 

“Cedric was being a prick,” Anna says, blunt. 

“Who is Cedric?” 

“Cedric Collinswood. He’s my year. Said...not nice things.” 

“About you?” 

“No.”

“About your brother?”

“ _No_ ,” she grits her teeth. 

“David?” 

“About you,” she says, looking down at her clenched hands. “He said you were a nutter who left because you didn’t want us anymore. He’s a Neanderthal, and a moron in anything that doesn’t require boots and a ball.” She sniffs. “His parents read the _Daily Mail_ ,” she adds, by way of a final, most hideous truth. 

“Criminal,” Sherlock adds. 

“I wish. Then you could toss him in prison.”

“So what happened with this moronic, football-mad troglodyte?” 

“I might have...lost my temper. A bit.” 

“Might?” 

“I...sort of...kicked him.” 

“Anna…” 

“It’s not my fault he’s such an oaf. I wasn’t even _trying_ to lay him out. I might have bloodied his nose, but the broken tailbone was just gravity at work on his great, useless lump. And I don’t care if the Warden,” she says with contempt, “saw. He deserved it.” She holds her head high. 

He smirks, imagining his six-stone nine-year-old employing her considerable martial arts prowess against a bullying classmate. He should not be so delighted (though he is utterly delighted). “Blue belt?” 

“Black. First degree,” she says, the smallest hint of pride creeping into her voice. 

He grins, whispers. “Stop smiling. It isn’t decent.” 

“ _You’re_ smiling.” 

He straightens, affecting a struggle to contain himself. “Right. Now look terribly upset and wail about my taking your tablet away.” 

She giggles, but summons her best acting skills. Crying and sobbing about everything that is _Just! Not! Fair!_ she throws her head on her arms on the bench outside the Warden’s office, wailing, as Sherlock affects his apologies for the scene and suggests it would best to take Anna–

“–and Jack–” she hisses. Hiccup, hiccup, wail. 

–and Jack, home for the day. He smiles brightly. 

“Excellent timing!” Jack exclaims, twenty minutes later on the Tube. “I was about to get told off for not having done my French homework.” 

“Why not?” Sherlock asks. 

“ _Ennuyeux_ ,” Jack answers. _Boring._

Fair point. “Be grateful you escaped this time. But finish it in the future,” he advises. “If only because they tend to make you repeat the more tedious work over and over as punishment.” 

“Speaking of which,” Anna sighs. 

“Speaking of what?” 

“Punishment.” 

“Whose?” 

“Mine. You aren’t really, are you? Going to take away my tablet?”

“Why would I do that?” he asks, baffled. 

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?” 

Sherlock scoffs. “Stupid.” 

She looks at him with suspicion. “You’re not very good at the whole disciplinarian thing, are you?” 

“Mmm, Molly is,” he says, as they arrive at their stop. “So it probably evens out. On that note, we should probably alert her that you’ve been dismissed from school. Wouldn’t want her to worry, would we?” 

\---

Molly blinks at the text photo Sherlock’s sent. Jack beams for the camera, and even Anna is wearing an amused half-smile (in her father’s presence, a minor miracle, that). Behind them the bright internal workings of a...clock face? 

_He wouldn’t_ , Molly Hooper thinks. 

_Have Jack and Anna. Home later. Bonding. -SH_ The text below the photo reads. 

_Sherlock Holmes you’re not where I think you are_ , she sends in return.

_I’m sure that would be against The Rules. - SH_

A few minutes later. 

_WE ARE THE LUCKIEST!!! - JHH_

“God help me,” she sighs, but cannot suppress a snort of laughter and a smile. 

\---

Furtive voices disrupt his thoughts. He sits upright at the sounds. 

“Mum! _Mum_!” 

“It’s okay, Ace. It’s okay,” Jack soothes. 

“Get off!” Anna cries. 

He’s on his feet before she can get to the bottom of the stairs. 

“Where’s Mum?” Tear tracks line her face, her cheeks pink and ruddy from crying. 

Panic flashes. “What’s wrong?” he asks. 

“He killed us,” Anna cries. “He killed us and he killed you and David and John and Mary, and Mum was _all alone_ and she had to cut us up and–” her voice runs together in near hysteria. 

“Come here.” He scoops her up in his arms, like he hasn’t since she was younger. She’d shot up to her height quickly some years before, but she was still well under five feet when her first growth spurt ended; she seems so much smaller like this. He makes shushing sounds, the way Molly does, and strokes her dark, shiny hair. “I’m sorry,” he holds her in his arms and she curls into him like a cat, her tiny, white feet perched on his thigh as she shakes and shakes. “I’m so, so sorry. Does this help? It helps me.” 

She sniffles, wipes her nose on her pyjama sleeve. “You have them too?” 

“Yes.”

“And,” she swallows thickly. “Mum holds you when you have nightmares?” 

“Yes.” 

“Me too.” Sniffle. “She’s good at it. Making me feel better.” 

“She is,” he struggles to say, “the best.” 

Her face crumples once more. “Why did you go?” she cries, fresh tears running down her face.

He stiffens, unable to find the right words and terrified of upsetting her more. “I was...scared. I thought I was responsible for you being taken. They tried to hurt you, my best things, because of me.”

“You found us, though. You and John.” 

_I know,_ he wants to say, but his voice won’t come. _I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry._

“Please,” her mouth quivers. He knows that lip quiver, and hates it. “Don’t _go away_ again.” 

He folds his arms around her, remembering the vow he gave to Molly. “I won’t. Not ever. I promise.” 

“ _Daddy_.” And as she says it, finally, his heart cracks. Tears of his own slip down his face as Anna sobs her heart out into his neck, her small hands holding onto him for dear life. He tucks her head under his chin, and tries, tries, _tries_ to make it right. The only way he knows how. 

He carries her to bed when her sobs have calmed. “My girl is the queen of the savages...” he sings, repeating the silly, special verses, over and over, softer and softer until both Jack and Anna’s steady breathing is the only sound in the room. 

He presses a kiss to their brows and descends to the stairs, where he knows Molly is waiting, perched on the bottom step. She leans her forehead against his. Kisses him. Takes him to bed. 

\---

“Who wants orange juice?” Molly asks over the din at the breakfast table, where a YouTube video is being played, three children and four adults are currently talking over one another while Ripper nips at their socked feet, hoping for scraps of bacon.

“Got one with vodka?” Mary asks under her breath. 

“Don’t tempt me,” Molly whispers back. 

Sherlock shoots to his feet. “Lestrade has a case. _Finally!_ ” He reaches for his coat. “John!” 

John blinks in disbelief. “I _just_ sat down, mate. Can we do coffee first?” 

“Oh, right. I’ll just explain that to the family members of our triple homicide. Bit of a delay, sorry. But the coffee was fresh and you know how important that is. Case, John!”

He presses messy kisses to the children’s heads that elicit groans and cries of annoyance before dashing out, coat and scarf in hand. John sighs and follows him out the door. 

Molly hears him pause, then a brief exchange and suddenly he’s leaning back into the doorway. Molly glances at him, not sure what he expects. “Um, bye,” she says. 

He learns over and kisses her deeply, lustily, like last night, and before that like he hadn’t in, oh, too, _too_ long– 

“Gross,” Jack grins. 

“Dis- _gus_ -ting,” Anna groans. 

“Know the feeling,” David sighs, pushing his glasses up. 

He breaks away, leaving her breathless, her head spinning. She goggles at little as she attempts to right herself while he smirks. _Prat_. He brushes her fingers in final parting, and ducks out again. 

“Yowza,” Mary says. “Still not used to it, are ya?” 

The corner of her mouth quirks up. She shakes her head. “Honestly, it’s been ten years. Not sure I’ll ever be.” 

\---

“‘Being dead?’” he reads, sliding next to her on the sofa. 

“Novel,” Molly responds.

“Literature. Boring. Another paranormal teenage romance, or have we exhausted the planet’s inexplicable supply?” 

“We have not; though it isn’t.” 

“Some harlequin travesty, then.” 

She gives him a look over the edge of her book. _Snob_. “No. Bit up your alley, actually.” 

“What then?” 

“Broadly speaking, it’s about a murder. A pair of scientists are killed on beach.” 

“And?” 

“And they _die_ , Sherlock. You’re familiar with the concept, I thought.” 

He leans head in hand against the arm of the couch, flippantly gesturing at the offending text in her hands. “I was lead to believe most mystery novels had a more complicated narrative.” 

She shakes her head. He seems determined to interrupt her. She sighs and sets her book in her lap. “You miss–” she starts to say. “It isn’t Cluedo, Sherlock. It’s not always about who did it, with what weapon, and what the motivation is. All those details are presented right up front in the first scene: Nameless thief; concrete block; greed. But that isn’t the point.” She fixes him with a look. “The story is about what happens after they die–”

Sherlock scoffs with derision. “So it _is_ a supernatural love story...” 

“Not to _them_. The characters are dead. The people they were, anyway; the story is about their bodies. What becomes of us when the biochemical processes in our lungs and heart and brain give up the ghost. It’s about reclamation, I suppose. The way the land and birds and insects dissolve and dismantle flesh and bone and returning all parts of us to the elements.” She lifts one shoulder, contemplating the theme. “It’s about the life that comes from death, and how ultimately, they’re two sides of the same coin.” 

He watches her face, catlike eyes sparkling. There’s the shadow of a smile hiding in the corner of his mouth, though he’s doing a good job of keeping it in check. Always a disguise with Sherlock Holmes. "Mmm, marginally more interesting than expected,” Sherlock comments, ever flippant. “But still: Dull. At least _Twilight_ makes for an excellent cautionary tale on the dangers of unhealthy relationships–"

“As does my journal,” Molly quips. 

"–not to mention the dangers of bad writing. Stephanie Meyer makes John look like Christopher Marlowe,” he sighs, tossing his mobile on the coffee table. 

“What you’ve suffered,” Molly deadpans, picking up her book up once more, thumbing for her page. 

“You don’t get enough death and decomposition as it is?” 

She shrugs. "Sure but it’s different. I think–” She pauses, perhaps a teensy bit embarrassed to admit it. “I think it’s sort of romantic, in way.” 

He looks her over. That hidden smile, again. Only this time, not-so-hidden. "You're a very strange woman, Molly Hooper."

"Yeah? No kidding," she says, pointedly.

Something settles between them. A comfortable, if fragile, silence. Reaching out, he takes the book from her hand, flips it over several times and tugs her down against his side. She stiffens at first, still unused to close contact, after so much time. Still, she thinks of his trembling hands on her the night before, somehow more tentative than even during their first sexual encounters. Their walls are beginning to come down, Molly knows, and the greatest destruction is done to them through the smallest of acts; the mundane; the intimate. 

_“First light, at last, for Joseph and Celice. A dawning death.”_

From the third floor, Jack strums his ukulele. His singing voice carries down the stairs, settles on the moment, bright and cheerful. Anna jumps in, ever slightly off-key. 

_“The doctors of zoology were out of time, perhaps, but they can be rescued from the dunes by memory...”_

Sherlock’s deep and rhythmic voice settles some of her frayed nerves. She relaxes against him as Jack and Anna pluck out their strange sort-of anthem from the floor above. 

_Rescued by memory_ , Molly thinks. 

Perhaps they all could be.

\---  
 _  
The knock at her door roused her from a doze. Satisfied the nausea was somewhat at bay, she raised her head. “I thought this was supposed to be over weeks ago,” Molly groaned._

_“While typically ending after ten to twelve weeks of pregnancy,” Sherlock said, “morning sickness can persist well into the second or even third–”_

_“Don’t tell me that!” Molly huffed. She rested her head against the blissfully cool tile of the bathtub, willing the nausea to reside. Sherlock moved beside her, rubbing her shoulders and neck, easing some of the tension away. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” she told him. “I’m fine.”_

_“You are more than fine,” Sherlock corrected. “You are healthy enough to conceive and successfully gestate a fetus–”_

_“Bloody parasite,” she croaked, feeling the waves of nausea again. “Get out,” she groaned._

_“Why?_

_“I don’t want you watching me throw up.”_

_“What does it matter?”_

_“Boundaries, Sherlock!”_

_He rolled his eyes at her. “Molly, considering the number of highly intimate things we’ve done, you should hardly be self-conscious about a little morning sickness.”_

_Sliding her teeth together she growled, “I’m sorry, did you just equate vomiting to having sex with me?”_

_He shrugged. “A certain analogy can be made. They do both tend to involve bodily fluids and it’s over once specific contents have been expelled–”_

_“Get out!” she snapped._

_“Fine!”_

_She threw up for another twenty minutes, comforted only by the fact that she was alone. But when she collapsed on the sofa with every intention of sleeping the worst of it off, he lay beside her, armed with crackers and ginger ale, and pulled her against his side. “Better?” he asked._

_She ran a hand across her abdomen, smiling into his dressing gown. “Better.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Being Dead" is an actual novel by Booker Prize-winning writer Jim Crace. You should read it. Or, really, anything by him. He's one of the greats. I think even Loo would agree with me.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Give your children my love, Sherlock,” Mycroft says, easing wearily into his chair. “Family, as Mrs. Hudson would say, is everything."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! It has been a while, hasn't it? I hope it is worth the wait :) Once more, I've added a chapter, because these darling babies keep hijacking my mind and writing themselves into more and more madness. My deep and endless thanks to [Amalia Kensington (amaliak01)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/amaliak01/pseuds/Amalia%20Kensington/works?fandom_id=133185) for her encouragement, suggestions, and cheerleading. Fact: She is the best.

\---  
 __

_He’d been away on a case for three weeks the day Molly came home to find the consulting detective passed out on her sofa, dead to the world._

_She showered and made dinner, fed Toby. She curled up on the floor by his head, switching the telly onto a repeat of The Bletchley Circle. Engrossed in the travails of the code-breaking lady detectives of post-war London and her tagliatelle al pesto, it wasn’t until the cushions shifted and a hand dropped on her shoulder that she noticed Sherlock’s breathing had changed._

_“Hi,” she said, leaning back. He blinked a greeting as she looked at him. She picked at her meal, the telly the only sound breaking the comfortable silence._

_“Anything interesting happen?” he rumbled, after a time._

_She made a face of discomfort. Oh, right on time. This one was clearly attuned to their father. “Yes, actually,” she replied, wincing again._

_He lifted his head, uncertain, suddenly alert. “What is it?”_

_She took his hand in hers and placed it on the side of her stomach, where parasitic little Hooper Holmes had been focusing his/her in-utero drop kicks._

_There should be a word devoted to that, she thought, marveling at the look that came across his face. The expression contained so much that it seemed beyond words. Or perhaps only beyond the bounds of English. Maybe it existed in some other language, the way there were words for the way sunlight looked when it fell through trees or the moment when two people wanted to speak, but were waiting for the other to begin. She could only begin to describe the shifting play of fearful fascination, the strange, confused pleasure that flit across his face all at once._

_“Oh,” said Sherlock._

_Molly gave a little groan.“Yeah. Think we might have a footballer.”_

_He said nothing for a long while. Molly put on Sky News. Sherlock laid where he was. He fell asleep again, his hand still on her stomach, her fingers entwined with his. At half ten she covered him with a blanket._

_“Foolish man,” she said, moved by a great swell of emotion._

_She woke a few hours later to the dip of the bed. She curled into him, resting her head on his shoulder. His hand found her stomach once more._

_“Hey Sherlock?”_

_“Mmm?”_

_“Welcome home.”_

_He said nothing, but she felt him smile._  
  
\---

There has, for some years now, been a Christmas tradition at Baker Street. 

“Get up get up get up get up!” 

He groans. 

Another voice demands, “Get up!”

“Do I know you?” Sherlock grumbles, refusing to open his eyes. He wraps his arms tighter, nestles further into his soft, sweet-smelling pillow. 

“Get uppppppp!” Jack cries. 

Sherlock finally cracks an eye. Dressed in a red housecoat and flannels, his son climbs up on the bed, bouncing up and down in annoyance. Irritating. In his arms, he can feel Molly chuckling. “Mmm,” he rumbles into her hair. “Some strangely insistent street children have broken into our house, Molly,” he says. “Send them away, please.” 

“Oh dear. Pass me your mobile. I’ll call Greg,” she grouses, refusing to open her eyes. 

Anna strides into the room in her purple cat paw pajamas, considering the scene. “Why are you still in bed? Get up! Presents! Coffee! The Watsons will be here soon.” 

Sherlock affects a puzzled look. “Molly, this one knows John and Mary. Do you think they’d be interested in other children? The one they have, Devon–”

Molly frowns, cracking one eye. “Isn’t it Derrick?” 

“It might be. Hard to say. You know I dislike small humans a great deal; tend to delete them.” 

“Indeed.” 

“Anyway, Damien (Could that be it?) He could use some playmates, couldn’t he?” 

Anna, not one for theatrics apart from her own, rolls her eyes. “Here we go... _yet again_.” 

Jack snorts, loving the game of it. “Dad, come on!” 

“‘Dad?’ No. I am sorry, small person. I am no one’s father.” 

“Yes, you _are_ ,” Jack insists, going through the old charade. “You’re Sherlock Holmes and Molly Hooper and I’m Jack Hooper Holmes and that’s Anna Hooper Holmes and we’re _your children_ ,” he says with great melodrama, grinning. 

There’s a silence. “Molly,” Sherlock says. “There are _delusional_ , insistent street urchins in our home.” 

Molly’s eyebrows furrow in mock disgust. “We don’t have to feed them do we?” 

“But you’re our parents,” Jack cries. “Anna! They’ve forgotten us!” 

“Funny how that only seems to happen when Dad has to get out of bed before noon,” she chides. Ripper yelps, wanting to be let out into the tiny back garden. She snaps her fingers and he follows her down the hall.

“Nope,” Sherlock quips. “No one’s father. She’s certainly no one’s mother. You’ll have to prove it.” 

“How?” 

“Make your case. What evidence do you have?” 

“You met Mum at St. Bart's.” 

“Easily deducible information. Could have got that from John’s blog,” he says, dismissive.

“You solve crimes for Scotland Yard, helpin’ Greg and Donovan. You _claim_ to hate Phil Anderson, but you really don’t. Yesterday you smoked three cigarettes but told Mum it was just one–”

Molly pinches his flank, scowling. 

“–John used to live here before he married Mary. You were best man at their wedding. You call us scoundrels and named me after the _best ever_ serial killer (sort of) and for my seventh birthday we saw Derren Brown do tricks in Covent Garden and Mum thought it was brilliant and you thought it was mental. Our baby sitter for a while was Archie Blake, but then he went to uni in Scotland, so Manali Mukarjee sits for us; she doesn’t like experiments but she’s _way_ better at video games. Her mum Meena and Mum were roommates at Caius College at Cambridge and Meena gets _super_ annoyed by you sometimes. And-”

“For God’s sake, haven’t you finished the game yet?” Anna pokes her head through the door again. Sherlock looks to Molly, grinning. She meets his eyes with a barely contained smile. 

“Problem?” Anna demands. 

At that, the tipping point, the most perfect example of Sherlockian procreation, Molly burst out laughing. “All right, all right. I think that does it. C’mere.” She tugs Jack down into her arms, peppering kisses along his head. “Happy Christmas, wild one. Infuriating but _delightful_ scoundrels, you are.” 

“Happy Christmas, Mum,” Jack sighs happily. 

Anna, never one to be left out, hops up behind him, smirking. “I, for one, see demonstrable evidence of where Jazza gets his _lazy genes_ from,” she taunts. 

“Stuff it,” her brother merrily retorts, sticking his tongue out at the use of Anna’s recent nickname for him. 

“Protecting the realm is taxing business,” Sherlock responds, sitting up properly. Jack and Molly rise, and Molly tickles her daughter’s nose with her own before placing an exaggerated kiss on her forehead. Anna’s small, doll-like face dimples in (tolerant) amusement. “Happy Christmas, honey bee.” 

There’s a cooing from the stairs and the sound of clacking heels. 

“Mrs. Hudson!” Jack bellows, scampering into the kitchen with Ripper and Anna not far behind. “We’re making hot chocolate!” 

“Let the madness begin,” Sherlock says with the air of a man resigned to his fate. 

“Good morning to you,” she answers. One hand on his bare chest, she sneaks a proper kiss, then another, and another that threatens to make them disgracefully late for presents and chocolate and terrorist children. How far they have come in the last two years, he thinks, tracing the curve of her jaw with his fingertip. How much the distance that once lay between them has fallen away. 

“We could give them the boot,” Molly cheerfully suggests, playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. “They’re cute. And resourceful. I’m sure they’d land on their feet.” 

“Tempting,” Sherlock says, shaking a hand as if weighing the options. “But I’ve gotten bizarrely attached to them. Perhaps next year.” They climb out of bed. Molly shrugs into his well-worn red dressing gown, and he, the blue. 

“Come _onnnn_ ,” Jack repeats, appearing in the doorway again. 

Sherlock sighs. “Harks the herald,” he laments, and quick as lightning, bends down and hoists his relentless ten-year-old over his shoulder. “Angels...fling?” 

“That’s not how it goes,” Jack warbles, upside down. Sherlock deposits him in his chair and distributes stockings. 

Anna grins “Angels fling...a righteous rainbow,” she giggles at her own terrible joke. 

“Seraphic sunbeams,” Molly offers, collecting mugs from the cupboard.

“Hallowed hurricanes!” Jack shouts. 

“Blessed blizzards!” Anna counters, unwilling to be bested. 

They go back and forth with their word games. And Sherlock, receiving both his tea and his Molly, settles against the table, watching the wild and willful holiday scene play out. 

\---

Regrettably, Mycroft does, finally, succeed in impressing a knighthood on him. When presented with the news, Sherlock had scowled ungraciously and refused the title. He was, however, made to attend the wretched ceremony and stand amongst insipid, well-dressed pompous figureheads discussing useless, pointless things. Monarchs, palaces, insufferable world leaders...all were usually dull beyond measure. 

It was a rare opportunity in which he was delighted to have been very, _very_ wrong. 

Sherlock presses his fingers together and watches. 

“What. Happened?” Mycroft demands. 

“ _He_ asked me to,” Anna says in defense from across the ornate table. She slumps down in her high-backed chair, leaning her head on her hand.

“It was _awesome_ ,” Jack smirks.

“It was _bollocks_ ,” David exclaims. 

“ _This_ is _stupid_ ,” Anna finishes. “I was just demonstrating how it’s _supposed_ to be done.” 

“Be that as it may,” Mycroft growls. “Niece of mine, your behavior has caused a great deal of distress. Much of it my own. Tell me, is this how you plan to represent your name and family as a young adult, or shall I hold out hope this was a one-time offense?” 

“He wanted to spar,” Anna says, unconcerned.

“His security team is less than pleased.” 

“As is his wretched judo instructor, I expect,” she answers, smirking at David. 

“Enough of this,” Mycroft growls. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?” Jack replies, his face the perfect image of angelic innocence. He blinks earnestly, which ruins the moment; just a bit much. _So_ close. 

“You know _what_.” His brother glares sideways. “Sherlock?” 

“Hmm?” 

“Would you mind–?” He gestures to the pre-adolescent terrors.

“Ah, _y-es_.” 

“Sherlock!” 

Eye roll. “Fine, Mycroft.” 

He stands and summons his most authoritative voice. “Anna. David. John. Very not good,” he says. And winks. 

Jack’s mouth twists into a smile. He looks directly into his lap to keep from showing. No doubt Mycroft sees it anyway, but he admires his son’s attempt at discretion. 

A knock at the door. “Sir.” Andrea steps into the room. “We’ve contacted the site administrators, but they’re stonewalling us. Also, the _Daily Mail_ , Gawker, TMZ and numerous other press outlets have the video.”

“So help me,” Mycroft laments, fingers to his bridge. 

“Think they’ll take away my shiny new title? Pity. I’d just updated the website.” 

A muscle tics in Mycroft’s cheek. The children smirk. As far as royal audiences go, Sherlock Holmes regards it a great success. (Even if he had been forced to keep the damn honorific.) 

Molly, on the other hand, feels _slightly_ different. 

“I can’t believe my daughter,” Molly groans that evening, considering the state of her inbox, which at present is stuffed with emails, Twitter notifications and Google Alerts on her children. “ _Your_ daughter, Sherlock Holmes,” she repeats, incredulous, “put the Crown Prince of England in a _headlock_.”

“Yes.” 

She turns her head to him. “Your godson called him an idiot.” 

“I know!” he beams, proudly. 

Rising, she crawls into his lap, winding her arms around his neck in mock threat. “ _Your son_ posted it on _YouTube!_ ” 

“God,” Sherlock replies. He tips his head back on the sofa back, feeling a little watery. “I didn’t think it was possible to love them any more.”

(Twenty-one years later, her new husband would look back on that afternoon at Windsor Palace, and, standing before one and all, admit it was the moment he knew he was in love with Anna Hooper Holmes.)

\---

“Explain,” Anna says, pausing the game on her tablet. 

Sherlock bites back on the urge to scowl. She had gotten into the habit of making the brief demand when she wanted something elaborated upon. Jack had picked it up as well. Sherlock had been complaining about it to Molly several nights before, and when he looked up, had found her shoulders trembling with laughter. 

“Problem?” she asked, catching his eye. 

(He’d thrown a pillow at her.)

So he holds his tongue, summoning patience. He finds it wanting. 

“You heard me.” 

“ _Explain_ ,” Anna says, grinding her teeth. 

“It’s like I said—I don’t have a mind palace,” Jack says. 

“But you _do_ use the method thing-y,” she protests. 

“Y-ip.” 

“The way Mycroft does. And Dad.”

“Y-ip.” 

“I don’t understand. How is it you don’t have a mind palace?” 

“Well, I do,” Jack said. “I just don’t put it in a house.” 

A snort. “So what is it then. A mind pyramid? Mind Stamford Bridge? Mind _Burj Khalifa_?” 

“Nope,” Jack says, sprawled out on the floor in front of the fireplace, hands folded across his stomach and Ripper resting his head beside them. “I’ve an _Underground_.” 

Anna purses her lips, resumes her game of Minecraft. “Lame.” 

From the kitchen, Sherlock’s mouth twitches, annoyance evaporating faster than the dish of isopropyl alcohol on the table before him. 

The pair of them are absurd. 

They are maddening.

They are absolute _perfection_. 

\---

It starts in Berlin sometime in early March. By April, cases have shown up in Vienna; Paris; Madrid; Cairo; Baltimore. Mycroft is unsettled. 

"We know it’s been engineered," he says over tea in the conversation room at the Diogenes, a rare note of distress creeping into his voice. That small seed of emotion is enough to betray the colossal gravity of the situation. “I’m told the artificial design is apparent. But we don’t know from what or by whom. Zoonotic, almost assuredly. Symptomatically, it resembles coronavirus, but with a morphology more closely aligned with Marburg—fever, fluid loss, respiratory failure, and in some cases, fatal hemorrhaging as vascular tissues decay.” 

Sherlock steeples his fingers, clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Contagious?” 

A grave glance. “ _Highly_.” 

Andrea’s deputy delivers a secure drive containing several petabytes of information, which he digitally projects onto the micrometer-thick translucent fiber-wire filament screen that now now covers the whole of the far living room wall of 221B (very helpful, technology; particularly regarding the preservation of Mrs. Hudson’s lovingly chosen wallpaper). The puzzle pieces are many: Iranian doctors; Chinese diplomats; American pharmaceuticals; Dutch researchers; Russian scientists; Venezuelan cartels. 

Threads spiral into gossamer shadows that unravel into still more threads, like menacing fractals of virulent international subterfuge. Painstakingly, he eliminates small pieces: Interpol makes Dr. Rutha Van der Hoos in Basel; the CIA apprehends key figures in the de la Vega family; the FBI raids Northwest Verdigris outside Portland. Loops close, none tying back to a source that knows anything about the disease or its manufacturers. 

The answers elude him. They elude MI5, and, most disconcerting, they elude the National Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization.

His inbox has dwindled to all but the most obvious of requests. Apart from Mycroft’s task, he hasn't had a decent case for ages. He doesn’t see his brother for weeks on end, at which point even _he_ cannot ignore the state of current events. Logically, of course, he knew the facts, and the theoretical implications, but the life and mind of Sherlock Holmes–replete with minor daily mayhem, bickering, science experiments, plus, you know, _the children_ –had always had a way of preventing the absorption of details. Somehow the magnitude of it escapes him until a day arrives in mid-spring when cordons are drawn, the Tube shuts down and frenetic, furious London crawls to stop. 

"For Gods' sake," Lestrade yells over his mobile. "There's a bloody epidemic on, you sod. Everyone's too busy _trying not to die_ to have time to commit murder." 

"It’s like the end of the world," Jack says, looking at the desolate streets. He idly stirs his breakfast. His son takes in the faces he sees in public and on his devices, as sharply attuned as much to the many moods and emotions of the world as he is to the facts and details he is able to perfectly recall. On the wall screen is a German news programme showing trucks rattling the roads of Berlin—contagion ground zero, and the worst affected metro region. The trucks are stacked with bodies. There is no longer room to bury them all. 

Sherlock is suddenly stricken by a realization."Where is Molly?" he asks. 

"Hospital. Emergency protocols, she said," Anna says, anxiously scanning the news. "We can't go to Germany." A strange note in her voice makes him turn. He and Molly have kept irregular schedules for years, tearing around all hours, working for days on end, maintained by the help of Mrs. Hudson, sitters, and the endless assistance of John and Mary. He has never seen Anna concerned by it. She scans the headlines on her tablet, eyes flicking furiously, her face pinched with worry. 

"Why not?" Jack asks her. 

"They've closed the borders." She idly taps her tablet; Sherlock spots the logo and layout of _The Guardian_. "So did the Americans." 

"We’ve no reason to travel at the moment," Sherlock says, staring out the window. "It would be inadvisable at any rate. Plus, airports. Disgusting even when there isn’t bloody pandemic." 

Jack pokes at his cereal. "I wanted to go to Alaska. I don't suppose we can now." 

"Obviously it's not permanent," Anna drawls, a rebuke in her voice that is particular to first-born children. He’s reminded of Mycroft. She looks up quickly, seeking the comfort of validation. "Right?" 

"Of course. Americans can't help being idiotic to a fault. They’re historically predisposed to it. Be glad the British gene pool is rid of them," he says, directing interest to the state of the flat. _Messy_. She hasn't been here for over a day. Not unprecedented, but unsettling all the same. "Try not to hold it against them, though. A pedigree for being an idiot is not a crime, though if it were, Anderson would have been locked away years ago," he jokes. 

Jack grins, rolling his eyes. 

His mobile chirps. Mary. _No school. Again. Send A and J over?_

Mrs Hudson raps at the door, calling in. "I've heard on the telly," she says, breathless. "They’ll be keeping the schools closed for another week. There’s been more looting, too. Oh, this is awful." The sudden silence that follows is made worse by the distinct lack of an overly optimist counterpoint. 

He jumps up quickly. "Mrs. Hudson, see them over to Mary’s, would you? Behave, scoundrels."

Anna pipes up. "'Where are you going?" 

"Bart's." 

Anna nods. In her dark eyes, he sees the wheels in her head turning. "Later then." 

"Laters," Jack echoes. 

Sherlock collects his coat, noting his son’s fingers as they tap a nervous staccato on the tabletop, echoing some inner melody played by heartstrings.

\---

He's made vividly aware of his dependence on cabbies and the Circle Line all his adult life. With a determined pace, he turns up his collar and sets off through the wet streets and a gray London fog. 

He has to lie and disguise his way through a security checkpoint to get into the hospital, and once he’s there, he finds whole corridors cordoned off. Through the doors, he sees the morgue is so full it is no longer an operational space. Sherlock grabs a mask and roams the halls, avoiding the military personnel who are posted at nearly every exit, searching for a short figure with long brown hair. Looking through a window, his heart briefly stops at the sight of a long braid slipping under a sheet and trailing off a gurney, but the color of the nails is wrong. They’re blackish, purple; not the pale pink Molly had done the previous Monday evening with Anna. He looks closer and realizes the dead woman’s nails are, in fact, bare. It is her _fingertips_ that are discolored—blackened by burst blood vessels and dead cells. 

When he finally spies her, she’s behind another glass partition in a crowded medical bay. The door is locked. He grabs a phone from the abandoned reception and buzzes in. Molly looks up sharply at the sound, confused by it, and catches sight of him through the large plate window. 

"Sherlock," she breathes into the phone, furious. “What are you _doing_ here?” 

"You need to come home," he says. 

“I–” she swallows. “I was going to call you this evening. I can’t," she says. "We’re so understaffed and it’s getting worse. Every day... Sherlock, it’s not an option." 

“Why?” At that, he realizes the doors to the medical bay are not just locked...they are closed off. Layers and layers of plastic sheeting, and vacuum sealed. 

“You don’t understand. Last week there were seventeen patients. Those seventeen became thirty, then over fifty. We’re under quarantine. It’s bad. I think you should take Jack and Anna to your parents. At least until the worst of it is over. I don’t know how long it will be, but the schools are closing, they said. I–” she paused. “I don’t want them to be here.” 

"Molly," he says, deeply affected. She’s denied his requests from time to time, refusing to indulge him when she felt he was being unreasonable or selfish. But never like this. "Come _home_ ," he says through clenched teeth. Why won’t she be reasonable?

She looks at him, bites her lip. "Oh, Sherlock.” Her mouth turns up like a smile, though it is not a smile itself. It is not a smile at all. "You see, but you don’t observe." 

_Skin: pale, clammy. Eyes: bloodshot. Could be lack of sleep, but no: Molly uses eye drops for that. She bought a new container last week, it isn’t a quarter way through. Her eyes are glassy, too. She looks shaky; weak. And…_

He knows what he’ll see before she presses her hand to the glass, the last, most vivid and terrible evidence of all. _No_...He stares in shock, bracing himself against the clear partition. 

Upon the other side, her fingers mirror his own, colored by the yellow-purple of damaged tissue.

She is already ill. 

Behind her a door opens. A crew in Hazmat suits enters the room, and one by one, they entreat the team to follow instructions. A slim, ginger doctor Sherlock recognizes from the radiology lab stumbles wearily to the door. 

"I couldn’t come home, even if I wanted to," Molly Hooper says, her voice full of sad kindness.

A Hazmatted figure takes her elbow, garbling instructions he cannot discern. 

"Go home, Sherlock," she implores. "Go home to your children. They may lose their mother before this is through," Molly struggles to say, her voice thin and shaky. Tears form in her eyes. The line crackles. "I won't have them lose you as well."

“Molly,” he calls, then louder. 

She sets the receiver down and is escorted to the far set of doors. Before she vanishes out of sight, pulled by two Unknowns in protective suits, she glances back at him, fearful. 

\---

When he stumbles into John and Mary’s house hours later, after an interrogation, blood test and forcible decontamination shower, the children are transfixed by the news flashing on a screen in another room. 

_“–3,000 new cases reported today in–”_

He watches the screen flash. 

_“–CDC officials and scientists from the W.H.O issued a statement today in Atlanta–”_

"What’s wrong? Sherlock–" John says, voice hushed. 

_“–experts say the outbreak of what’s being called CBRV–Charlottenburg Respiratory Virus– may be slated to becoming the deadliest pandemic in over a century, since Spanish Flu killed somewhere on the order of 50 to 100 million people between 1918 and 1920–”_

He looks at his best friend. “Everything.” 

\---

“Where is she?” he demands of Mycroft. He glares down at his brother across his desk. 

Mycroft presses his fingers together. "She, along with each of the affected civilians, several dozen other military and health workers from Barts, The Royal London and UCL Medical Centre, are being held at a restricted facility in Tunbridge Wells," Mycroft says. "For the time being.”

Sherlock’s fingers and legs twitch furiously. "Not working, though, is it dear brother,” he says, coldly. “Don’t you have people for this sort of thing? Find a vaccine." 

"Would that I were able, Sherlock," Mycroft says, sounding almost despondent. For once, he seems to mean it. 

“The entire reason so many infections have sprung up in such a short time is an appalling public health protocols by your government. Have you learned nothing from previous outbreaks? SARS? MERC? _Ebola_? Why haven’t you suspended immigration?” 

“Civil rights aside–” Mycroft begins, testily. Sherlock waves a hand, dismissive, knowing full well that Mycroft could not care less for personal liberties in a time of national crisis. “Sherlock,” his brother says. “You must understand–I’ve no desire to deprive your children of their mother, nor you a domestic partner. But we are attempting to force the movements of Russian virologist we believe to have played a part in manufacturing the disease. No less than five separate Syrian affiliates have been apprehended. All transporters; mules. And all with apparent immunity to a disease presently laying waste to the rest of the planet. We _need_ that information." 

Sherlock slams his hand on the his brother’s desk. "People. Are. Dying." 

Mycroft leans back in his chair, looking more careworn than Sherlock can recall ever seeing him. "And we cannot stop it. All lives end, brother. One way or another." 

_I told you not to get involved._

"Give your children my love, Sherlock,” Mycroft says, easing wearily into his chair. “Family, as Mrs. Hudson would say, is everything." 

\---

“Emergency protocols” only gets him so far. For much of the following day, they regard his cagey non-answers with suspicion. Something is wrong, they know, and the only form of communication they are allowed with their mother paints a telling picture. 

“Hello scoundrels,” Molly says, smiling at the camera. Even without the HD image, he would be unsettled by the sallow coloring in her face, the hollowness in her already thin features. Dark crescents hang beneath glassy eyes. 

“Mum,” Jack leans in. “When are you coming back?” 

“Darling–” 

“You’re sick,” Anna interrupts, face contorting in horror.

Molly nods. “Yes.”

“But the news...they said the mortality rate,” David says, incredulous. “It’s-It’s over seventy percent.” 

“Yes. It is,” Molly admits. “You know the facts. That chances are… _a bit not good_ ,” she says, quoting John Watson.

“Don’t make jokes,” Anna says, her brows worried, her mouth trembling. “Don’t make _jokes_ about this!” 

“ _Shh, shh._ Calm down Ace,” Mary whispers, pressing her head to Anna’s shoulder.

Molly’s face is unnatural. She wears a forced smile and tries overly hard to project good cheer and energy. “I love you so much.” 

“Stop saying that.” Anna’s lip curls in a pained and disbelieving sneer. “Stop saying it like you won’t say it again!” 

“Molly,” David musters, trying to be brave. His voice sounds uncommonly small. “We really, really miss you.”

Jack stares, eyes wide. Uncomprehending. “Mum,” is all he can manage. “ _Mum._.”

She forces a placating smile. Over the children's shoulders, Sherlock stares, stricken. They say nothing to each other. An old memory plays out.

_Safety not guaranteed, Sherlock Holmes._

\---

John, compelled by both a sense of duty and his training, takes leave from his shared practice and is conscripted by an old colleague into a military unit assisting the W.H.O. at various facilities throughout the city. He has, obviously, never done well when made to cool his heels. 

Sherlock is reviewing Mycroft’s latest developments when Mary bolts up the stairs and through the door. “Oh, thank God you’re here,” she says letting out a long breath, relieved to see him. “You idiot, I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour. John sent me. He’s at UCL. She came in this morning. Oh God–” 

“Mary,” he says, rising. “What is it? Molly–” His chest tightens. He cannot move. He–

“No, Sherlock,” Mary shakes her head, voice breaking. “It’s Mrs. Hudson.” 

\---

It is only John’s status and Mycroft’s meddling that get them to the wing she is situated in. Tubes and wires and blipping monitors surround her. None paint a particularly good picture. 

“Mrs. Hudson, come now,” John teases. He leans over her, on the far side of the bed. He dares remove his surgical mask. “Stop laying about.” 

“My boys. My lovely, lovely boys.” Martha Hudson takes a difficult breath. Her breathing is thin, the sound of a small bird or a fluttering wind. 

“They,” Sherlock starts to say. “The children wanted to come. Jack pitched a fit.” 

“Jack? Not like him. Such a sweet boy. Just like his mum. Except when he’s up to no good. All you, then,” she smiles. Her hands are so small. The skin fragile, studded with needles. It brings...too much to mind. 

He smiles, though he does not know precisely why. John dips his head. Sherlock blinks quickly. 

“They all wanted to see you. David and Mary. Wanted to be here.” John’s voice breaks. 

“Best they’re not, eh? Not a place for children.” 

Molly would be in a place like this. A place where her children could not say good bye. 

“You hug those dear children. You give them my love, John. You love them so much, Sherlock. Promise.” 

_Promise_ , they echo. 

“My boys,” she says with softness. Slowly, her breath grows short. Her grip on their hands weakens. Her eyes fall shut. 

They do not open again. 

\---

He phones. 

She cries. 

They are both utterly powerless.

\---

The service is a quiet affair in the countryside, not far from the village where Martha Hudson grew up. Her younger sister, niece and nephew, assorted friends, all of them occupy folding chairs, smell nauseating flower arrangements and cluck incessantly. Memories are swapped; stories are shared. 

Sherlock hates every minute he is made to endure. 

He texts Molly’s mobile, wanting distraction. For the past ten days, she has been as communicative as possible. He asks for her most recent status, and those of her colleagues. The metrics are always a comfort, if not always the implications they reveal. 

“I can’t believe it,” Mary says, dabbing at her eyes. “I keep expecting her to waltz in with biscuits, telling me about some bit of gossip what she’s heard from Mrs. Turner.” 

“Yeah. Yeah. I can’t quite get it either,” John replies. 

“Mad old lady,” Mary laments. She rubs her husband’s back. “I want to be just like her, someday.” 

“She was an odd one,” John says. “Not to mention our greatest champion,” he adds fondly, nodding knowingly to Sherlock. 

“Apart from fans of your blog,” Sherlock replies. He feels restless. Irritable. He checks his phone. No response yet. 

David, Jack and Anna are subdued by their grief, if not exactly reserved. Mrs. Hudson is not the first person in their lives to have passed away. There have been acquaintances with parents, siblings, loved ones lost in the pandemic. A girl the year below lost an entire unit of her extended family: aunt, uncle, young cousins. The Latymer Lower football coach had died two weeks before. More recently, the parents of a young nurse at John and Mary’s practice. 

“Was it true she used to be...a stripper?” David asks, considering one of the many photos of the younger Martha Hudson that Mary and her niece, Cordelia, have placed throughout the overly decorative and sweet smelling parlor. 

“Yup,” he answers. Frowns. “Though I sincerely advise you not to attempt to find evidence on YouTube, David, ” Sherlock quips. “The experience was permanently scarring.” 

"Noted," David grins, but it lacks his usual brightness. He wanders off, no doubt to join Jack and Anna, wherever they have gotten to. 

He texts Molly again, frowning at the timestamp. For the hundredth time, the grim sterility of the hospital room where Martha Hudson had died springs to his mind. Stale air and the beeping of machines. The oppressive, silent company of people waiting to live, or waiting to die. A temperature-regulated infectious disease unit would be kept quite cool. Secluded against her will, somewhere unfamiliar and strange, Molly would be cold. Something in his chest twists at the thought. 

A woman with a severe expression takes his elbow. “Is that your beastly child?” she accuses, pointing to the window. Outside, where the lawn dips to a gentle green meadow, Anna and David lay on the grass, watching as Jack attempts to walk on his hands. 

Were Mrs. Hudson present, she would no doubt be cooing and clapping her praise. 

“I’d ask you to show him the proper behavior befitting a funeral,” she says with scorn.

He turns, taking the woman’s details in. His eyes narrow. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Martha Hudson’s savings were willed to a London charity for sufferers of domestic abuse. A smaller amount was set into a trust in the name of, among other young people, that _beastly_ child you seem quite keen to criticize, doubtlessly because although you’re not precisely a distant relative–the nephew’s wife, is it?–you’ve little to no idea of the meaning that she had to them. How much of a presence she has been in their lives; how she cared for them; played with them; _loved them_.” 

He leans down, ever so little. “I believe his behavior is _entirely_ befitting of this particular funeral.” 

To be fair, the rudeness of her response was rather expected. 

Anna and David have moved to the leafy shade of a large tree when he joins them outside. Jack rests his arms on a rough-hewn fence beside the bucolic meadow. “Nice gymnastics,” Sherlock says. 

“Felt like I should be doing something silly. Things that'd made her laugh,” Jack explains. “She used to like Anna’s karate tricks and all. Or when I’d dance with her in the kitchen. Some scowly old crone told me off for it.” 

“I hope you told her off.” 

“Started speaking Spanish at her real fast. Said I’d run away from my family to join the circus. She called me an 'effing gypsy nuisance.’” He looks up. “Are people _really_ such awful clods?” 

“You’re asking the wrong man.” 

Eyebrow lift. “Why so?” 

“Prejudiced against idiots.” 

Smirk. “Eh. Least you're equal-opportunity about it.” He looks out at the serenity of the countryside. Birds flying. Sunlight shining. A sweet, warm summer breeze on the air. The antithesis of everything he knows to be true. “It’s weird that it’s so nice here, and back at home everyone’s mad they’re gonna get sick and die. It’s fine being at Gran and Grandpa’s an’ all, but...Dad, I miss it.”

“London?” 

“Not just that.” He shakes his head. “Things bein’ normal.” 

This time he rings Molly. 

She does not answer. 

\---  
 __

_In retrospect, he supposed the comment about her now obvious weight gain was somewhat unwise. As was the request for coffee (she was feeling the loss), the annoyance expressed when several samples from the upstairs lab went missing, and the (probably misplaced) tirade regarding a recent lack of medically-donated cadavers. Regrettable._

_Unaccommodating as Bart's was, he’d made an offhand comment about her coming to Baker Street (“with any phalanges that you might happen to come across; digits of the left metacarpals and metatarsals preferred”) that evening. Molly had declined._

_“I’m going_ home _, Sherlock. I’ve got to pack.”_

_“What? Why? Where are you going?”_

_She glanced up from her slides, annoyed. “I had this conversation with you two weeks ago.”_

_“Deleted it.”_

_“And again last week.”_

_“Well it didn’t stick then, either, did it?”_

_Molly took a breath. “I’ll be out of town tonight and this weekend. Visiting Meena. Who just had a baby?”_

_“Is everyone suddenly procreating?” Sherlock huffed in disbelief._

_“I would like to meet my dear friend’s newborn daughter, who will no doubt be a fixture in_ your _child’s life, might I add.”_

_“It’s like the whole of the United Kingdom decided, simultaneously–” he said to no one in particular._

_Molly’s jaw jutted out. Her eyes narrowed. “Are we even participating in the same conversation anymore?”_

_“What?”_

_She glared, throwing several sharp instruments into the autoclave bin. “My point, exactly. Goodbye, Sherlock.”_

_Some hours later, after he’d stalked off to Baker Street, found it irritatingly quiet, and headed off for the Watson’s new digs on Camden Lock, he’d relayed his grievances in Mary’s general direction._

_“Oh, I know,” she said, giving him the look that always made him feel like an especially small and stupid child._

_“Do you?” He began playing with his phone, studiously avoiding her eye._

_“Yeah. I gave her a lift to the train station. She vented a bit. Thought it was interesting.”_

_“Interesting how?”_

_Mary patted her son’s back, giving him an inscrutable look. David considered him seriously, perhaps assessing if he made an acceptable candidate for parenthood._

_“What?” Sherlock asked._

_“Nothing,” she shrugged. “Just figured, all things considered, it'd be_ you _who needed the space,” she says._

 __  
\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oddly enough, I've had the plans for this chapter in the works for almost a year (oh goodness, I'm slow), since long before public health issues spiraled into a media maelstrom. Forgive any slights against Dick Wolf, but just to be clear: I've not "ripped from the headlines." 
> 
> Thoughts and comments deeply appreciated! Happy holidays, to one and all!


End file.
